New York Times and other outlets sue web browser Brave over alleged content scraping
techcrunch ·
The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against the privacy-focused browser company Brave, alleging that it scraped copyrighted content and distributed it to artificial intelligence firms. The suit claims Brave acted as both a thief and a distributor of stolen material by supplying data to major AI developers including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. Additionally, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel filed a separate but similar complaint in federal court in Manhattan. The litigation highlights Brave's use of an unidentified crawler to index over 30 billion webpages while preventing publishers from blocking the activity. Furthermore, the complaint addresses Brave's practice of bypassing paywalls and blocking publisher advertisements in favor of its own ad network. Founded in 2015, Brave has raised approximately $250 million to date, though it has not yet responded to requests for comment regarding these allegations. This legal action adds to existing lawsuits the Times has brought against other AI entities like OpenAI and Perplexity.
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