The New York Times and other media outlets sue browser company Brave, alleging scraping of copyrighted content

The New York Times sued browser company Brave on Monday in Manhattan federal court, alleging that it scraped the newspaper's copyrighted content and illegally distributed it to AI clients; the complaint names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as clients. On the same day, Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel also filed similar lawsuits in Manhattan federal court. The complaint alleges that Brave used unnamed crawlers to build an index of more than 30 billion web pages that publishers cannot block, and describes Brave as both a thief stealing publishers' content and an AI "fence" selling stolen goods to third parties; the lawsuit also targets Brave's paywall-bypassing feature and its practice of blocking publishers' ads while selling its own ads. The New York Times previously sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar allegations; this suit seeks an injunction and damages. Brave did not immediately respond to a request for comment.