NEW YORK — New York Times Sues Brave Browser Over AI Scraping

The New York Times and a group of other American newspapers have sued the maker of the Brave web browser, accusing the company of scraping their websites without permission to feed artificial-intelligence systems and of helping readers bypass digital paywalls, according to The Verge, which cited a Reuters report on the filing.

What does the lawsuit allege?

The complaint says Brave Software built an index of scraped websites and then monetized it by selling AI companies paid access to "real-time online content from the Brave Index," according to the filing described by The Verge. Those companies use the material to train AI models, to answer specific user queries, or both, the complaint states. "Brave has never asked for the Publishers' permission to access their websites, much less to copy the material and provide it to users or other AI companies," the complaint says, according to The Verge's account of the filing.

Which AI companies received the scraped data?

The complaint names several recipients of what it calls "stolen copyrighted content," alleging Brave provided the material to "many" AI firms, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere, The Verge reported. The filing does not describe any response from those AI companies to the allegations, and none is quoted in the source material reviewed.

How does Brave's paywall blocker work, according to the complaint?

Beyond the data-licensing claims, the publishers' complaint targets a feature in the Brave browser marketed as a "Paywall blocker," which the company promotes as giving users access to "hundreds of top publishers," according to The Verge. The complaint alleges that feature lets Brave users read paywalled articles without paying or subscribing, a practice the publishers say was never authorized. "On the contrary, as noted above, Brave allows its users to bypass the Publishers' paywalls without" permission, the complaint states, per the excerpt cited by The Verge.

Who are the plaintiffs in the case?

The case was filed by the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, according to The Verge, with The New York Times joining as a plaintiff in a related action covered in the same report. The publishers frame the dispute as twofold: unauthorized use of their journalism to build and sell a commercial AI-training index, and a separate browser feature that undercuts the subscription paywalls that fund their newsrooms.

What happens next?

The source material reviewed does not include a response from Brave Software, nor does it specify what relief the publishers are seeking in court or when a hearing might be scheduled. The filing adds newspaper publishers to a widening set of plaintiffs — spanning media companies, authors and artists — that have sued AI firms and intermediaries over the past two years for scraping copyrighted material to train large language models. Brave's browser, built on Chromium, has marketed privacy and ad-blocking features as its draw, and its paywall-bypass tool has been promoted as a selling point rather than disclosed as a potential point of legal exposure. Further developments, including any Brave statement or court scheduling, were not available in the material reviewed for this report.