The New York Times sued Brave in federal court in Manhattan on Monday, alleging the privacy-focused browser maker scraped its copyrighted content and unlawfully passed it on to AI companies. The Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar suit the same day.
The Times says Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages with an unidentified crawler that publishers cannot block. It names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as customers of that data, and calls Brave an "AI fence" that sells stolen content. The suit also targets a Brave feature that bypasses paywalls and the company's practice of blocking publishers' ads while selling its own.
The publishers seek an injunction and damages; no figure was given. Brave, founded in 2015 and reported to have raised about $250 million, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.