New York Times and three other newspapers sue Brave, accusing it of selling scraped journalism to AI companies
The suits say Brave's search index of more than 30 billion pages relies on a crawler that publishers cannot identify or block.
The New York Times sued Brave Software in federal court in Manhattan on Monday. The suit alleges that the privacy-focused browser company copied the Times's copyrighted journalism without permission and distributed it to customers it names as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. The same day, the publishers of the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a separate complaint in the Southern District of New York. Both complaints quote Brave as saying its index holds more than 30 billion webpages. They allege that Brave has not disclosed the name of its crawler or offered site owners a way to block it specifically. The Times's filing lists more than 10 million registered copyrighted works, and the other newspapers say their registered issues contain more than 2 million articles. The suits also target a Brave browser feature that gets around paywalls, and Brave's practice of blocking publishers' ads while selling its own. The Times calls Brave a "supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" for AI companies. It is seeking an injunction and damages. The Times has also sued OpenAI and Perplexity. Brave did not immediately respond to TechCrunch's request for comment. The cases test whether companies that supply data to AI developers can be held liable alongside the developers themselves.