Major Publishers File Federal Lawsuits Against Brave Software Over AI Scraping

The New York Times, alongside a coalition of publishers including the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel, has initiated federal legal action against Brave Software. Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the lawsuits accuse the privacy-focused browser company of unauthorized content scraping and the systematic distribution of copyrighted journalism to artificial intelligence firms. The plaintiffs argue that Brave has effectively turned itself into a clearinghouse for stolen intellectual property.

At the heart of the dispute is the allegation that Brave utilizes an unidentified web crawler to index over 30 billion pages, including protected news articles. The publishers contend that Brave then sells access to this massive database through its Search API to prominent AI companies, such as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. The New York Times specifically characterized Brave’s business model as acting like a digital fence, profiting from the misappropriation of professional reporting.

Beyond the AI training claims, the lawsuits target Brave’s browser features that allow users to circumvent paywalls. The plaintiffs argue that these tools undermine their subscription-based business models by providing free access to content that requires payment. Furthermore, the publishers take issue with Brave’s practice of blocking third-party advertisements on news sites while simultaneously serving its own ads to users.

The New York Times claims it made multiple attempts to resolve the issue, including sending cease-and-desist letters to Brave CEO Brendan Eich as early as August 2025, which reportedly went unanswered. The newspaper is now seeking both an injunction to halt the alleged practices and financial damages. These cases represent a significant escalation in the ongoing tension between media organizations and technology companies regarding the use of copyrighted data in the development of generative AI models.