The New York Times sues Brave browser over AI scraping and paywall circumvention

The New York Times and several publishers have separately sued Brave browser developer Brave Software, alleging that it illegally scraped content for AI training and let users bypass paywalls. According to the complaints by the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, Brave sells paid access to real-time online content in the Brave Index to AI companies, monetizing the scraped website index for them to train models or answer user queries; the complaints allege that Brave provided "stolen copyrighted content" to multiple AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere without ever obtaining publishers' permission or compensation, and also promoted in the browser a paywall-bypass feature that can access "hundreds of top publishers."