New York Times and Major US Newspapers Sue Brave Browser Over AI Data Use
A group of prominent US newspapers has taken legal action against Brave Software, alleging the browser maker scraped their content without permission and supplied it to AI companies while also helping users bypass paywalls.
The New York Times, together with several other major American newspapers, has filed lawsuits against Brave Software, the company behind the privacy-focused Brave web browser. The complaints, lodged on Monday, November 2, in a federal court in Manhattan, accuse the firm of copying news articles without authorization and passing that material to artificial intelligence companies.
According to the filings, the publishers allege that Brave uses automated software to collect articles from news websites and stores the resulting information in its search database—a practice widely known as web scraping. The newspapers contend that this copying was carried out without permission and without paying any licensing fees to the outlets that produced the journalism.
The suits were brought by The New York Times, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel. The publishers further claim that Brave sells access to the collected material through its search services, enabling AI developers to use the content for training models or generating answers. The complaints name Anthropic, Perplexity, xAI, and other AI developers as parties that allegedly received access, though none of those companies is listed as a defendant.
A separate allegation centers on paywalls. The newspapers say Brave helps users get around subscription barriers to read paid articles for free, undermining the revenue that funds their reporting. They argue the company is effectively profiting from journalism produced by others while failing to compensate the outlets behind it.
The allegations have not been proven in court, and Brave has not yet publicly responded to the claims. The case adds to a growing set of legal disputes over how AI systems obtain and use copyrighted news content, and it could influence how browser and search tools handle material published by media organizations.
