New York Times and Tribune group sue Brave over AI content scraping

The legal action targets Brave’s massive index of over 30 billion webpages, which the plaintiffs claim was built using an opaque crawler that ignores standard publisher blocks. Beyond unauthorized data collection, the lawsuits challenge the browser’s technical features designed to bypass paywalls. Publishers also contend that Brave unfairly profits by stripping away their native advertising while injecting its own commercial content into the user experience.

The New York Times, which previously initiated litigation against OpenAI and Perplexity, explicitly labeled the browser company a purveyor of stolen intellectual property. The suit seeks both an immediate injunction to halt these practices and unspecified monetary damages. Brave, a firm that has secured roughly $250 million in funding since its 2015 inception, did not provide an immediate response to the allegations.