The New York Times sues Brave web browser for AI scraping and bypassing paywalls

The New York Times and several other newspapers have filed lawsuits against Brave, the company behind the popular web browser, for allegedly engaging in illegal content scraping to train artificial intelligence models. Additionally, Brave allows users to bypass paywalls on these publishers' websites without permission.

According to the complaint filed by the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel, Brave Software has been monetizing its collection of scraped content by providing paid access to AI companies. These companies use the scraped material to train their AI models, respond to user queries, or both. The companies named in the lawsuit include Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.

Brave's "Paywall blocker" feature on its browser grants access to hundreds of top publishers, but the lawsuit asserts that Brave has never sought permission from these publishers to access their content. Instead, Brave's actions involve copying the material and distributing it to users and other AI companies without consent. The complaint emphasizes that Brave has not compensated publishers for the unauthorized use, copying, and distribution of their copyrighted content.

A New York Times spokesperson, Graham James, stated in a statement that while the company supports ethical AI development, Brave has disregarded copyright laws and ignored repeated requests to stop its infringing behavior. The lawsuit aims to hold Brave accountable for stealing content to power its products and provide it to leading generative AI companies.

Brave, Anthropic, Mistral, SpaceXSI, and Cohere have not yet responded to requests for comment.