The New York Times has sued Brave, the maker of the privacy-focused web browser, over claims that the company scraped copyrighted journalism and supplied it to AI companies. The suit was filed on Monday, November 2, in federal court in Manhattan, according to TechCrunch. Search Engine Journal also covered the case.
Who is suing. Alongside the Times, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar suit in the same court, according to TechCrunch. Brave was founded in 2015 and, per private-market trackers cited by TechCrunch, has raised roughly $250 million.
What the papers allege. The complaints say Brave scraped the outlets’ copyrighted content and distributed it to customers they name as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. These companies are named as customers and not as defendants. The Times calls Brave a supplier, dealer and distributor of stolen copyrighted content for AI companies. The papers say Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages using an unidentified crawler, which they say leaves publishers unable to block it.
The other claims. The suit also targets a Brave browser feature that bypasses paywalls, and the company’s practice of blocking publishers’ ads while selling its own. Search Engine Journal reports that Brave allegedly sells access to its index through a Search API that lets AI firms retrieve web content for their products.
What the Times wants. It is seeking an injunction and damages. These are allegations in complaints and not findings by a court. Brave did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment, and no response had been reported when the coverage was published.
The wider fight. The Times has also sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims, according to TechCrunch. Other reporting notes that in July, News Corp countersued Brave after Brave had earlier sued News Corp, seeking a ruling that its search practices were lawful. The cases are part of a growing set of disputes over who may use news content to power AI products.
Why it matters. Many AI products rely on search indexes to answer questions with current information. If a court finds that building and selling such an index breaches copyright, search and AI companies could need licences or have to change how they collect pages. For publishers in the US and UK, the case tests whether blocking tools such as robots rules are enough, since the suit says the crawler could not be blocked.
What to watch. Look for Brave’s response in court, any motion to dismiss, whether the named AI customers are drawn in, and how this case compares with the Times’ suits against OpenAI and Perplexity.
Sources: TechCrunch and Search Engine Journal. Details are allegations from the complaints, as reported by those outlets.
Stacked newspapers (representative image), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
