New York Times and Other Publications Sue Brave Browser for AI Scraping and Paywall Bypassing
The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and other publishers have sued Brave Software, alleging it provided unauthorized copyrighted content to AI companies like Anthropic and xAI via its 'Brave Index' and helped users bypass news paywalls with its 'Paywall blocker' feature.
According to Reuters, The New York Times, along with the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel, has filed lawsuits against Brave Software, the developer of the Brave web browser. The plaintiffs allege that Brave unlawfully scraped copyrighted content to train artificial intelligence models and allowed users to bypass news website paywalls through its built-in 'Paywall blocker' feature.
Court filings indicate that Brave allegedly monetized its index of scraped websites by providing AI companies with paid access to "real-time online content from the Brave Index." These AI companies reportedly used this access to train models or respond to user queries. The lawsuit claims Brave provided "stolen copyrighted content" to several AI firms, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.
Graham James, a spokesperson for The New York Times, stated that Brave ignored repeated requests to stop its infringing conduct and stole content to power its products and provide it to prominent generative AI companies. Steven Lieberman, the attorney representing the other three publications, argued that Brave is "laundering pirated reporting for the AI industry."
Brave and the named AI companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment. This lawsuit represents a new legal front in the broader copyright disputes surrounding AI training data, following previous suits against model developers like OpenAI and Microsoft.