New York Times and Publishers Sue Brave Software Over AI Scraping

The New York Times and a group of publications, including the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel, filed federal lawsuits in Manhattan on Monday against Brave Software. The plaintiffs allege the browser developer used scraping tools to illegally harvest exclusive news stories from their websites, crawling over 30 billion webpages without providing a way for owners to block the crawler.

The lawsuits claim Brave resells this copyrighted data to artificial intelligence companies—including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere—via a product called the Brave Index. The publishers further allege that Brave facilitates the bypassing of paywalls through a paywall blocker feature without permission or compensation. While AI companies like Anthropic and Perplexity are identified as recipients of the content, they are not named as defendants in these specific suits.

Legal representatives for the publishers characterized Brave as a fence for stolen content. Perplexity's chief communications officer dismissed the claims as disinformation. These legal actions follow previous lawsuits filed by the same news organizations against OpenAI and Microsoft.