Major News Publishers File Lawsuit Against Brave Over AI Scraping

The New York Times, alongside the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel, has initiated legal action against Brave Software in a Manhattan federal court. The lawsuits contend that the privacy-focused browser company has engaged in the unauthorized scraping of copyrighted journalism to build a massive index of over 30 billion webpages. According to the filings, this data is then leveraged to support Brave’s own AI features and sold to prominent artificial intelligence firms, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.

The plaintiffs characterize Brave’s operations as a sophisticated form of digital misappropriation. The legal complaints describe the browser as acting like a "burglar" that harvests protected content and an "AI fence" that distributes stolen material to third-party developers. By utilizing an unidentified web crawler that publishers cannot effectively block, the news organizations argue that Brave has systematically bypassed their ability to control how their intellectual property is accessed and used.

A central point of contention is Brave’s alleged circumvention of subscription models. The lawsuits target a specific browser feature marketed as a "paywall blocker," which the publishers claim allows users to access premium content without a valid subscription. Furthermore, the plaintiffs allege that Brave’s AI tools, such as the "Ask Brave" search feature and its LLM context endpoints, can reproduce significant portions of copyrighted articles verbatim, effectively providing a substitute for the original journalism.

The legal action includes multiple counts of copyright infringement, including direct, contributory, and vicarious liability, as well as claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and allegations of unjust enrichment. The publishers are seeking both an injunction to halt these practices and financial damages for the harm caused to their business models. As of the filing, Brave has not provided a public response to the allegations.

This litigation marks another significant chapter in the ongoing tension between media organizations and technology companies regarding the training of AI systems. The New York Times has previously pursued similar legal strategies against other AI developers, emphasizing that the unauthorized use of their reporting threatens the sustainability of professional journalism. The outcome of this case could have far-reaching implications for how browsers and AI search tools interact with copyrighted web content in the future.