New York Times and other publishers sue Brave over AI scraping

The New York Times and several other newspapers filed federal lawsuits in Manhattan on Monday against Brave over alleged unlawful web scraping and paywall circumvention, according to The Verge. A separate complaint from the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel accuses Brave of distributing copied articles to AI companies, the Orlando Sentinel reports.

The publishers allege Brave copied content from more than 30 billion web pages without identifying its crawler or providing a way for sites to block it. They say Brave sells access to its index for model training and responses to user queries, including to Anthropic, Perplexity AI, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. Those AI companies are not named as defendants.

The complaints also allege Brave's browser lets users access paywalled articles without permission. The newspapers are pursuing claims of direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement. "Brave has flouted established copyright law and ignored repeated requests by The Times to stop its infringing conduct," a Times spokesperson told The Verge. The publishers, which are also suing OpenAI and Microsoft, did not report a response from Brave.