New York Times and other publishers sue web browser Brave over content scraping

The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against web browser developer Brave in a Manhattan federal court. The complaint alleges that Brave scraped copyrighted material from the outlet and provided it to AI companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity, and xAI. A separate lawsuit featuring similar claims was filed by the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel.

According to the legal filings, Brave maintains an index of over 30 billion webpages captured via a proprietary crawler, which publishers report is difficult to block. The New York Times characterizes Brave's actions as a form of illicit distribution, alleging the company operates as a supplier of copyrighted content to the artificial intelligence sector.

In addition to the scraping allegations, the litigation challenges Brave’s browser features that circumvent digital paywalls and its business model of blocking third-party advertisements while simultaneously selling its own inventory. Founded in 2015, Brave has not yet issued a formal response to the lawsuits. The plaintiffs are seeking both monetary damages and a permanent injunction.