NYT and Three Papers Sue Brave Over AI Scraping Claims

The New York Times and several other publishers have filed lawsuits against Brave Software, the developer of the Brave web browser. The suits allege that the company scraped content without permission for use in AI training and let users bypass publishers' paywalls.

The complaints claim Brave supplied copyrighted material to a large number of AI companies. Brave has reportedly not yet responded to requests for comment on the allegations, which means its side is unknown for now and the accusations rest solely on the plaintiffs' account.

What the complaint alleges

According to the complaint filed by the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, Brave Software is commercializing an index of the websites it crawls. The company is said to sell AI firms paid access to real-time online content drawn from that index, known as the Brave Index. Those firms are alleged to use it to train their models, to retrieve content when answering certain user queries, or both.

The filing claims Brave provided what it calls stolen copyrighted content to numerous AI companies, among them Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. These statements are the plaintiffs' allegations as set out in the complaint, not findings confirmed by a court.

The paywall blocker feature

The second strand of the case concerns the Paywall blocker feature in the Brave browser. According to the complaint, Brave promotes the feature as providing access to hundreds of leading publishers. The filing argues that Brave lets users bypass publishers' paywalls without their consent.

The complaint says Brave never asked publishers for permission, nor did it obtain approval before copying the content and serving it to users or to other AI companies. It further alleges that Brave took other steps to prevent publishers from blocking Brave's access to their sites, and that it paid publishers nothing for the use, copying and distribution of this content.

Statements from the parties

New York Times spokesperson Graham James said Brave is disregarding well-established copyright law and has continued its infringing conduct despite repeated requests from the Times. According to James, the suit aims to hold Brave accountable for using the content to power its own products and to feed some of the world's most prominent and well-resourced generative AI companies.

Steven Lieberman, the attorney who filed on behalf of the three newspapers, argued that AI giants have been taking news content from publishers without permission while trying to avoid getting caught, and that Brave sold them a back door to that content. In his words, buying stolen goods second-hand does not make them legitimate.

Brave, Anthropic, Mistral, SpaceXSI and Cohere could not be reached for comment initially. Perplexity communications head Jesse Dwyer responded to the suit sharply, saying The New York Times pays its lawyers too much and its journalists too little.