NYT and other media outlets sue Brave over AI scraping — The Verge

The New York Times and a group of other publications have filed lawsuits against Brave Software, the developer of the Brave browser. The company is accused of allegedly unlawfully scraping materials to train artificial intelligence systems and of enabling users to bypass paid access to publications.

As The Verge reports, the lawsuit was also filed by companies that operate the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel.

Allegations concerning the Brave Index

In the complaint, the publishers claim that Brave Software monetized its index of websites collected through scraping. In particular, they say the company provided AI companies with paid access to real-time online content from the Brave Index.

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The plaintiffs state that AI companies could have used this index to train models, answer specific user queries, or for both purposes. The complaint says that Brave allegedly supplied copyrighted content to many AI companies. The companies named include Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere.

Claims regarding the Paywall blocker feature

The publishers also point to the Paywall blocker feature in the Brave browser. The company advertises hundreds of leading publications as accessible through this feature. The plaintiffs state that Brave did not seek permission to access their websites, copy materials, or provide content to users and AI companies.

The New York Times spokesperson Graham James said that Brave had ignored repeated demands from the publication to stop actions that the Times considers copyright infringement. Brave, Anthropic, Mistral and Cohere did not respond to a request for comment. Perplexity communications director Jesse Dwyer called the claims in the lawsuit disinformation.