On Monday, The New York Times sued Brave, an 11-year-old privacy-focused browser company, accusing it of scraping the media’s copyrighted content and illegally distributing it to clients named in the lawsuit, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.
On Monday, The Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel also filed similar lawsuits. Both cases were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The New York Times has previously sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar allegations, describing Brave in its complaint as a "supplier, distributor, and reseller" of copyrighted content stolen by AI companies.
The complaint states: “In this way, Brave acts both as a thief stealing publishers’ content and as an AI ‘fence’ selling that stolen content to third parties.” The complaint alleges that Brave uses an unidentified crawler to build an index of over 30 billion web pages, preventing publishers from blocking it.
The lawsuit also targets a feature in the Brave browser that bypasses paywalls, as well as the company’s practice of blocking publishers’ ads while selling its own.
Brave was founded in 2015. According to data from private market tracking firms, the company has raised approximately $250 million to date. The New York Times has sought a court injunction and damages. Brave did not immediately respond to requests for comment.