The New York Times and several other publishers have sued Brave Software, the company behind the Brave web browser, alleging that it unlawfully scraped their websites to support artificial intelligence services and enabled users to bypass paywalls, according to Reuters.
A complaint filed by the companies that operate the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel alleges that Brave monetized its index of scraped websites by selling AI companies access to “real-time online content from the Brave Index.” According to the complaint, companies use that material to train models, answer specific user queries, or both.
The filing claims Brave supplied what the publishers describe as stolen copyrighted content to several AI companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. It also alleges that Brave promotes access to hundreds of publishers through a “Paywall blocker” feature in its browser.
The publishers say Brave never obtained permission to access, copy or redistribute their material, and accuse the company of taking steps to prevent them from blocking its access. They also claim Brave has not compensated them for using, copying or distributing their copyrighted content.
Graham James, a spokesperson for The New York Times, said the newspaper supports the responsible development of AI but believes Brave ignored copyright law and repeated requests to stop the alleged infringement. He said the lawsuit seeks to hold Brave accountable for using the newspaper’s content to power its products and provide it to major generative AI companies.
Brave, Anthropic, Mistral, SpaceXSI and Cohere did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity’s chief communications officer, disputed the allegations in a statement to The Verge, criticizing The New York Times’ legal spending and the information contained in the lawsuit.
Sources: The Verge.