The New York Times and other outlets sue Brave over alleged content scraping
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The New York Times sued Brave, alleging that the company scrapes copyrighted content and unlawfully distributes it to customers including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere, for training models or answering queries. Separately, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar lawsuit; both cases were brought in federal court in Manhattan.
The complaints also accuse Brave of selling access to real-time content through the Brave Index and offering a browser feature that bypasses paywalls. According to TechCrunch, The New York Times’ lawsuit says the index contains more than 30 billion web pages collected by an unidentified crawler, and that Brave makes it difficult for publishers to block it. Brave did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Why it matters · editorial interpretation
The lawsuits put the commercial use of copyrighted content for model training and query responses, as well as real-time access and paywall bypassing, before the courts. The cases could affect how AI companies and data providers negotiate rights with publishers, although the allegations have not been adjudicated and Brave did not respond to a request for comment.
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