The New York Times sues Brave over alleged AI scraping and paywall bypassing

The New York Times and other publishers have filed lawsuits against Brave Software, the company behind the Brave browser, alleging that it scraped their websites to train AI systems and helped users bypass paywalls.

A complaint from companies operating the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel says Brave sold AI companies access to real-time content from its index of scraped websites. The complaint alleges that the companies used the index to train models or answer user queries, and names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere among those that received copyrighted content.

The publishers also allege that Brave promoted hundreds of publishers as accessible through its “Paywall blocker” feature, accessed websites without permission and took steps to prevent publishers from blocking that access. The complaint says Brave did not compensate publishers for the alleged use and distribution of copyrighted material.

Graham James, a spokesperson for The New York Times, said the paper filed its lawsuit to hold Brave accountable for what it considers copyright infringement. Brave, Anthropic, Mistral, SpaceXSI and Cohere did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment. Perplexity communications chief Jesse Dwyer criticized the lawsuit in a statement to the outlet.