The New York Times sued Brave, an 11-year-old privacy-focused browser company, on Monday, accusing it of scraping its copyrighted content and illegally distributing it to customers under lawsuit names such as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.
Separately, the Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed similar lawsuits Monday. Both cases were filed in federal court in Manhattan.
The New York Times, which is also suing OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims, likens Brave to “suppliers, dealers, and distributors of copyrighted and stolen content” for AI companies.
“In this way, Brave acts as an AI ‘fence’ between the robbers who exploit publishers’ content and sell the stolen content to third parties,” the complaint says. It says Brave used an unknown crawler to build an index of more than 30 billion web pages, which publishers can no longer block.
The lawsuit also targets the Brave browser’s ability to circumvent paywalls and the company’s practice of blocking publishers’ ads while selling its own ads.
Brave was founded in 2015 and has raised about $250 million to date, according to Private Market Tracker. The Times is seeking an injunction and damages.
Brave did not respond to requests for comment.
