The New York Times and a coalition of publishers have filed lawsuits against Brave Software, alleging the company scrapes content for AI companies and allows users to bypass paywalls.
The New York Times and a group of publishers have filed separate federal lawsuits in Manhattan against Brave Software, the company behind the Brave web browser. The legal actions allege that Brave has engaged in unlawful scraping of copyrighted content to train AI and has enabled users to bypass publisher paywalls.
According to complaints filed by The New York Times and a coalition including the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel, Brave has built an index of more than 30 billion webpages using an unidentified crawler. The lawsuits allege that Brave has monetized this index by providing AI companies with paid access to "real-time online content from the Brave Index."
The complaints state that AI companies use this index to train their models, access content to "respond to specific user queries," or both. The lawsuits name Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere as companies that have received this content. The New York Times' complaint describes Brave as acting like "a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI ‘fence’ that sells stolen content to third parties."
The lawsuits also target Brave's browser features. Publishers allege that Brave promotes "hundreds of top publishers" as being accessible through its "Paywall blocker" feature, which allows users to circumvent subscription walls without consent.
Additionally, the complaints criticize Brave's practice of blocking publishers' advertisements while selling its own. The publishers allege that Brave has taken steps to prevent them from blocking Brave's access to their websites and has never compensated them for the use of their copyrighted content.
Graham James, a spokesperson for The New York Times, stated, “While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, Brave has flouted established copyright law and ignored repeated requests by The Times to stop its infringing conduct.” He added that the suit aims to hold Brave accountable for providing content to "some of the most prominent and well resourced generative AI companies in the world."
Steven Lieberman, the attorney who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the other three publications, said, “AI giants are now desperate to avoid getting caught red-handed stealing news from publishers, so Brave Software is selling them a back door to the journalism they know they have no right to.”
Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity’s chief communications officer, dismissed the claims, stating, “The New York Times is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists. (Who could’ve easily identified the disinformation in this suit.)"
The New York Times is seeking an injunction and damages. Brave, Anthropic, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
This litigation marks an escalation in legal battles between media organizations and technology companies. While many existing lawsuits target AI model developers, this case targets the infrastructure providers that facilitate large-scale data scraping. A ruling against Brave could impact how browsers handle paywalled content and how data is supplied to the AI industry.
Sources
This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Company claims are reported as claims. Cover image is AI-generated.
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