The New York Times on Monday sued Brave, the 11-year-old privacy-focused browsing company, alleging that it took the outlet’s copyrighted content and illegally distributed it to clients with the names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere.
Separately on Monday, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar lawsuit. Both were arraigned in Manhattan federal court.
The New York Times, which also sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar allegations, likens Brave to a “purveyor, reseller and distributor of stolen copyrighted content” to AI companies.
“In this way, Brave acts both as a burglar that hijacks content from publishers and as an AI ‘fence’ that sells the stolen content to third parties,” the complaint reads. It says Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages using an unidentified crawler, preventing publishers from blocking it.
The suit also targets a feature in the Brave browser that circumvents paywalls and the company’s practice of blocking publishers’ ads while selling its own.
Founded in 2015, Brave has raised about $250 million to date, according to private market trackers. The Times is seeking an injunction and damages.
Brave did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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