The New York Times and three unnamed publishers filed a federal lawsuit against Brave Software in Manhattan on 3 November. The complaint alleges Brave built a massive web index using an unidentified crawler to scrape content and then sold access to that data to major AI companies. The publishers claim Brave acted as an ‘AI fence’ by monetising stolen copyrighted material.
Brave reportedly scraped over 30 billion web pages and provided the content to Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere for model training or query responses. The lawsuit states Brave bypassed paywalls and blocked publishers’ ads without permission. Brave raised around $250 million in funding since its founding in 2015 and markets itself as a privacy-focused browser.
This legal action adds to a series of copyright disputes between news publishers and AI firms. The New York Times previously sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims of content scraping. The publisher seeks an injunction and damages from Brave. This case underscores the ongoing struggle for publishers to control their content in the age of AI training.
