The New York Times and Other Publishers Sue Brave Over AI Data Scraping and Paywall Bypass

Image: The New York Times sues Brave web browser for AI scraping and bypassing paywalls · Source

The New York Times and several newspapers have filed lawsuits against Brave Software, alleging unauthorized scraping for AI training and enabling users to bypass paywalls without consent.

The New York Times, alongside publishers including those of the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel, has filed a lawsuit against Brave Software, the maker of the Brave web browser. The complaint alleges that Brave has unlawfully scraped copyrighted content from publisher websites without permission, including for use in training artificial intelligence (AI) models.

According to the lawsuit, Brave has monetized an index of scraped online content called the "Brave Index" by providing paid access to various AI companies such as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. These AI companies reportedly use the content to train their models and to generate responses to user queries, effectively distributing the publishers’ copyrighted material without authorization.

Furthermore, the browser includes a "Paywall blocker" feature that allows users to circumvent paywalls on hundreds of top publishing websites. The publishers contend that Brave has taken deliberate measures to prevent their sites from blocking this unauthorized access.

A spokesperson for The New York Times stated, “While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, Brave has flouted established copyright law and ignored repeated requests by The Times to stop its infringing conduct.” They emphasized that the lawsuit aims to hold Brave accountable for appropriating their content to support its products and benefiting prominent AI organizations.

Brave and the named AI companies have not issued a public response to the lawsuit. Perplexity’s chief communications officer dismissed the suit as containing disinformation, remarking that The New York Times is "overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists." This legal action highlights growing tensions between traditional media publishers and tech companies developing AI technologies reliant on web-sourced information.

The case remains ongoing, with the lawsuit underscoring concerns about copyright infringement, data use, and the impact of AI on publishing business models.