The New York Times on Monday sued Brave, the privacy-focused browser company founded in 2015, accusing it of scraping the newspaper’s copyrighted content and unlawfully providing it to several AI companies named in the complaint: Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere.
The suit was filed in federal court in Manhattan. On the same day, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a separate, similar lawsuit.
Allegations in the complaint
The Times accuses Brave of acting as a "supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" to AI firms. The complaint states that "in this way, Brave acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content to third parties."
According to the complaint, Brave built an index of more than 30 billion webpages using an unidentified crawler, a process publishers were unable to block. The lawsuit also targets a Brave browser feature that the Times says bypasses paywalls, and it criticizes Brave’s practice of blocking publishers’ advertisements while selling its own ad offerings.
Remedies sought and background
The New York Times is seeking an injunction and damages in the suit. The publicly available summary of the complaint does not specify the monetary amounts sought.
Brave, founded in 2015, has raised roughly $250 million to date according to private-market trackers. The company had not immediately responded with a comment at the time the report was published.
This action follows earlier legal moves by The New York Times, which previously sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims regarding the use of publishers’ content in training AI systems, underscoring ongoing legal disputes over publishers’ rights and the training data used for AI models.
