New York Times Files Lawsuit Against Brave Over AI Data Scraping

The New York Times has initiated a federal lawsuit against Brave Software, accusing the privacy-focused browser developer of unlawfully scraping copyrighted content to fuel artificial intelligence technologies. Filed in Manhattan, the complaint characterizes Brave as a facilitator of intellectual property theft, alleging the company built a massive index of over 30 billion web pages to supply AI firms with unlicensed training data. The Times claims that Brave’s practices effectively turn the browser into a distributor of stolen journalism, providing material to prominent AI developers including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.

In a parallel legal action, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel have filed a separate suit against the company. Both legal filings argue that Brave’s search index and API services allow AI models to bypass traditional content protections. The plaintiffs contend that Brave utilizes an unidentified web crawler that prevents publishers from effectively blocking their content, thereby harvesting articles without permission or compensation.

Central to the allegations is the claim that Brave’s tools, such as its 'Ask Brave' feature, can reproduce substantial portions of protected articles. According to the court documents, testing revealed that the company’s API could return nearly the entire text of specific news reports, demonstrating a capability that the publishers argue goes far beyond standard search indexing. The lawsuits further target Brave’s paywall-bypassing features, which the plaintiffs assert allow the company to access and monetize restricted content that should remain behind subscription barriers.

The legal complaints include five counts, ranging from direct and contributory copyright infringement to violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and claims of unjust enrichment. By selling access to this scraped data through its Search API, the publishers argue that Brave is profiting from the unauthorized use of their intellectual property. The New York Times is seeking both injunctive relief and financial damages to halt these practices. As of the latest reports, Brave has not provided a public response to the allegations.