New York Daily News and others file copyright lawsuit, alleging Brave stole content and resold it to AI giants

The New York Daily News, The New York Times and several newspapers under Tribune Publishing sued Brave Software on Monday in Manhattan federal court, alleging that it scraped paywalled content and resold it to AI companies including Anthropic and Perplexity. The complaint alleges that Brave's index crawled and copied more than 30 billion web pages, neither identifying itself nor providing website owners with a mechanism to block the crawler, and also sold copies of publishers' content to third parties for training AI models and generating answers. The lawsuit cites examples: when a user asked Brave's Ask Brave to show that day's New York Daily News articles, the chatbot listed the headlines of 35 paywalled articles and offered to extract the full text; in another example, the bot copied verbatim and paraphrased a report from the Orlando Sentinel. The lawsuit brings five claims including direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement; Brave did not respond to a request for comment, and the AI companies alleged to have purchased content were not named as defendants.