New York Times and other outlets sue web browser Brave over alleged content scraping

The New York Times sued Brave on Monday, accusing the 11-year-old privacy-focused browser company of scraping its copyrighted content and unlawfully distributing that material to customers the suit names as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. Both cases were filed in federal court in Manhattan on the same day.

A parallel suit was filed Monday by the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel, alleging similar conduct. The Times has already litigated comparable claims against OpenAI and Perplexity, and in this complaint it characterizes Brave as a "supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" for AI companies.

Beyond the scraping claims, the suit also takes aim at product-level features and business practices. It challenges a Brave browser feature that bypasses paywalls, and it objects to the company blocking publishers' own advertisements while selling ads of its own. The Times is seeking both an injunction and damages.

The suits arrive as publishers increasingly test how existing copyright law applies to AI-era indexing and syndication. What remains unresolved is whether the courts will treat Brave's crawling as ordinary search indexing or as commercial redistribution — and whether an injunction, if granted, would force changes to Brave's crawler disclosures, its paywall-bypass feature, or its ad-blocking defaults. The named AI customers are defendants only insofar as the Times characterizes them as Brave's downstream buyers; whether any of them face separate exposure is not addressed in the filings.