New York Times and Publishers Sue Brave Over AI Content Scraping and Paywall Bypassing

The New York Times, alongside publications like the Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel, has launched federal lawsuits in Manhattan against Brave Software. The complaints allege that the 11-year-old privacy-focused browser built an index of over 30 billion web pages using an unauthorized crawler, monetizing the scraped data by providing paid access to AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.

The lawsuits characterize Brave as an unlawful distributor and broker of copyrighted content, pointing to features that allegedly let users bypass paywalls while blocking publisher ads in favor of its own. Founded in 2015 with roughly $250 million in funding, Brave now faces heavy legal scrutiny over its real-time online content indexing practices utilized for model training and query responses.