The New York Times, along with several other major news outlets including the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, have filed lawsuits against the privacy-focused web browser Brave. The litigation alleges that Brave engaged in the systematic scraping of copyrighted content and distributed that data to a variety of artificial intelligence companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.
In its legal filing, the New York Times characterizes Brave as both a ‚burglar‘ that misappropriates publisher content and an ‚AI fence‘ that sells that stolen content to third parties. The suit specifically highlights Brave’s use of an unidentified crawler to build an index of over 30 billion webpages, which reportedly prevented publishers from blocking the scraping. Additionally, the complaint targets Brave’s features that bypass paywalls and its practice of blocking publisher advertisements to prioritize its own.
Founded in 2015 and having raised approximately $250 million to date, Brave is now facing a push for an injunction and financial damages. These lawsuits are part of a broader trend of media organizations taking legal action against technologies that utilize their content to train AI models. Brave has not yet provided a formal response to the allegations.
Source: TechCrunch · summary generated by AI
