New York Times, other news outlets sue Brave over content scraping

The New York Times sued Brave on November 2, accusing the 11-year-old privacy-focused browser company of scraping its copyrighted content and distributing it to AI companies without permission. The lawsuit names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere as customers that allegedly received the scraped material.

Filed in federal court in Manhattan, the suit describes Brave as acting like a “supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content.” According to the complaint, “Brave acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI ‘fence’ that sells stolen content to third parties.”

Separately on the same day, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar lawsuit, also in Manhattan federal court. The two cases were not combined but were brought on the same day against the same company.

The Times’ complaint says Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages using a crawler the suit does not identify by name. That scale, the paper argues, left publishers unable to block Brave’s crawling the way they might block a named, disclosed bot.

Paywalls and ad-blocking also named

Beyond the scraping claim, the lawsuit also targets a Brave browser feature that the Times says bypasses paywalls, and a company practice of blocking publishers’ own ads on web pages while selling Brave’s own advertising instead. Together, the complaint frames these as a broader pattern of profiting from publisher content without compensating the publishers who produced it.

The Times is not new to this kind of litigation. It has previously sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims about unauthorized use of its journalism to train or power AI products. The Brave lawsuit extends that legal campaign to a browser maker that supplies content to multiple AI companies rather than a single AI developer.

Brave, founded in 2015, has raised roughly $250 million to date, according to private-market trackers cited in reporting on the case. The browser is best known for built-in ad-blocking and tracker-blocking features marketed around user privacy.

The Times is seeking an injunction to stop the alleged practices along with monetary damages. The complaint does not specify a dollar amount in the material reviewed.

Brave did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.

The case adds Brave to a growing list of technology companies facing publisher lawsuits over how AI systems and AI-adjacent tools obtain and use news content, as outlets test various legal theories of liability against companies that collect web data at scale and pass it on to AI developers.