The New York Times sued privacy-focused browser company Brave on Monday, alleging it scraped copyrighted material and distributed it to artificial intelligence companies.
The Times filed the case in federal court in Manhattan, TechCrunch reported. The lawsuit names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as Brave customers.
The Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar lawsuit Monday in the same court. TechCrunch did not detail differences between the two cases.
The Times accuses Brave of acting as a “supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content” for AI companies.
“In this way, Brave acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI ‘fence’ that sells stolen content to third parties,” the lawsuit says.
The Times alleges Brave built an index containing more than 30 billion webpages. It says Brave used an unidentified crawler to create the index, leaving publishers unable to block it.
The lawsuit also challenges other parts of Brave’s business.
The Times targets a browser feature that it says bypasses publisher paywalls. It also objects to Brave blocking publishers’ advertisements while selling its own ads.
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The Times is seeking an injunction and damages. TechCrunch did not provide a specific damages figure.
Brave did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. The company was founded in 2015 and has raised roughly $250 million, according to private-market trackers cited by TechCrunch.
The allegations add another publisher dispute over how technology companies obtain and distribute copyrighted journalism.
The Times has also sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims, according to TechCrunch. The Brave case, however, centers on allegations involving the browser company’s own crawling and distribution practices.
For publishers, the most significant allegation is Brave’s role between websites and the AI companies named in the complaint.
The Times alleges Brave collected publisher content and supplied it to third-party customers. Whether Brave disputes those allegations, and how it characterizes its index and crawler, remains unresolved in the source.
For now, the claims remain allegations. TechCrunch’s report does not include Brave’s response to the lawsuit.
