The New York Times sues popular web browser

Brave browser, offered independently to users and known for being simple and fast, faces a major lawsuit.

Accused of scraping publishers' content without permission and distributing it to artificial intelligence (AI) companies such as Anthropic, Mistral, and xAI, Brave will testify in Manhattan federal court.

BRAVE FACES LAWSUIT

The New York Times filed a lawsuit against privacy-focused internet browser Brave on grounds of copyright infringement. In the lawsuit filed in federal court in Manhattan, the newspaper claimed that Brave collected copyrighted content without authorization and illegally distributed this data to artificial intelligence (AI) companies.

Alongside The New York Times, the Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel applied to court on the same day with similar claims.

The customers Brave allegedly supplied data to, as listed in the complaint filed against the internet browser, include Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.

Having previously filed lawsuits against OpenAI and Perplexity with similar claims, The New York Times accused Brave of being a supplier, seller, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content for artificial intelligence (AI) companies. The court filing stated that Brave acted like a thief taking publishers' content without permission and a broker selling this stolen content to third parties.

Claim of a 30 billion page index and an unblockable crawler

Technical claims in the lawsuit file state that Brave built an index of over 30 billion web pages using an unidentified web crawler bot. The filing argues that a method was used that made it impossible for publishers to detect and block this crawler.

The allegations were not limited to data collection activities. The lawsuit targeted the following elements:

• The Brave browser feature bypassing publishers' paid subscription paywalls,
• The blocking of original publisher ads on websites,
• The insertion and sale of Brave's own advertising model in place of blocked ads.

Parties to the case and requested sanctions

Founded in 2015 and having raised approximately 250 million dollars in investment to date according to private market data, the 11-year-old company Brave has not yet made an official statement on the matter.

In addition, The New York Times and the other plaintiff news organizations are requesting an injunction from the court against Brave's content crawling and distribution activities, as well as monetary damages for losses incurred.

Brave is a browser offering privacy-focused browsing and built-in ad-blocking tools to its users. This lawsuit directly turns the browser's paywall-bypassing features and its model of blocking ads on websites to deploy its own ad network into legal targets.

At the same time, the data supply chains of companies developing artificial intelligence (AI) models such as Anthropic, Mistral, and xAI come under court scrutiny. The outcome of the lawsuit could affect the practices of artificial intelligence (AI) companies purchasing training and search data from third-party broker indexes.