The New York Times and Other Publishers Sue Brave Browser Over Unlawful Data Scraping for AI Training and Paywall Bypassing

The New York Times and several other media publishers have filed a lawsuit against the developer of the Brave browser, accusing it of illegally scraping content for AI model training and helping users bypass paywalls. According to the complaint, Brave commercialized its index of scraped content by providing paid access to AI companies—including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere—to train models or answer queries. Brave is also accused of promoting its paywall-blocking features while never obtaining licensing permission from publishers or paying copyright royalties.