New York Times and other publishers sue Brave over scraping and paywall bypass
The case could determine whether a browser's web index can be sold to AI companies without publishers' permission.
The New York Times and, in a separate suit, the Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel have sued Brave Software in federal court in Manhattan, accusing it of scraping their copyrighted articles and distributing them without permission. The plaintiffs say Brave's web index of more than 30 billion pages is sold to AI firms including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere, who use it for training or for answering queries. A further complaint targets a Brave browser feature that lets users get past paywalls, along with the company's blocking of publisher ads while it sells its own. The Times is seeking an injunction and damages, and Brave had not responded to requests for comment at the time of reporting.
Why it matters
For publishers, the suits test whether they can control how their articles are copied and reused once they are on the open web, since the complaint says publishers cannot block Brave's crawler. For AI companies that have reportedly bought access to Brave's index, the outcome bears on where real-time web content can come from. For readers, the case centres on whether paywalled journalism stays behind the paywall. The plaintiffs are asking for an injunction and damages, so a court ruling, not just the filing, will show how far the claims reach.
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