New York Times and Three Newspapers Sue Brave Over Scraping

By Olivia Hart

The New York Times and three other newspapers sued Brave in Manhattan federal court on Monday over an alleged system that indexed more than 30 billion web pages and distributed copyrighted content to five AI companies.

The Times alleges Brave built the index with an unidentified crawler, leaving publishers unable to block it. The complaint names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as customers that received the allegedly scraped material.

The Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a separate, similar lawsuit on Monday. Both cases went to federal court in Manhattan.

What do the lawsuits allege?

In its complaint, The New York Times likens Brave to a “supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content” for AI companies.

The lawsuit states: “In this way, Brave acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI ‘fence’ that sells stolen content to third parties.” That language presents the plaintiffs’ legal theory; it is not a judicial finding.

The Times also targets Brave’s browser feature that bypasses paywalls. It challenges Brave’s practice of blocking publishers’ ads while selling its own ads.

The lawsuit as described provides no usage figures for either practice and no estimates of resulting revenue loss. The core allegation is that Brave copied protected material and helped distribute it commercially.

Which publishers are involved?

The New York Times has also sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims. That history puts Brave alongside companies already accused in court, although the earlier suits do not establish the merits of these cases.

The separate lawsuit by the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel broadens the publisher coalition. The report calls that case similar but gives no distinct claim-by-claim breakdown.

The report does not state the relief sought in the separate case. Four newspapers now press closely related claims against Brave in the same federal court.

How does Brave’s business model matter?

The Times links the alleged scraping to Brave’s economics: one challenged feature circumvents publisher paywalls, while another blocks publisher ads and sells Brave’s own.

That linkage may help plaintiffs connect technical conduct to commercial benefit, but the report provides no evidence quantifying revenue effects or the benefit to Brave.

Brave did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company therefore has no stated defense in the report, leaving its response to the crawler, index and advertising practices unresolved.

Brave faces allegations that touch both its content pipeline and its advertising model.

How much scale is at stake?

Founded in 2015, Brave is an 11-year-old privacy-focused browser company. According to private-market trackers, it has raised roughly $250 million to date.

The report gives no valuation, revenue, profitability or individual funding-round terms. Those omissions limit what can be inferred from the $250 million estimate.

The 30-billion-page allegation gives the plaintiffs a vast claimed distribution footprint. The suit treats the index as a supply chain connecting publishers’ content with downstream AI customers.

The funding figure shows outside capital, while the indexing claim remains an allegation. Neither fact resolves the copyright dispute.

What could the cases change?

The Times seeks an injunction and damages. Its filing asks a federal court to restrain conduct that the plaintiffs say unlawfully copied and distributed their content.

The report describes no court ruling and no Brave response. It leaves three factual gaps: the crawler’s identity, how the material reached the five AI companies, and how the paywall-bypass feature works.

The cases will test whether Brave’s role as browser provider and search-index operator carries liability for alleged downstream copying. Brave’s response and evidence on those three gaps will shape whether the plaintiffs can secure an injunction or damages.