NYT, Tribune Papers Sue Brave Over 30B-Page AI Scraping Index

The New York Times and three Tribune Publishing papers, the Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel, sued Brave Software in Manhattan federal court on November 2, accusing the privacy-browser maker of building a 30-billion-page scraping index and reselling the content to AI companies. The two complaints were filed the same day as separate but parallel actions, TechCrunch reported.

The Times complaint describes Brave as a "supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" and says the company "acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content to third parties." The alleged index, "more than 30 billion web pages using an unidentified crawler," per the filing, is marketed to AI firms including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere, the complaints say.

The Times also goes after Brave's paywall-bypass feature and its practice of stripping publishers' ads while selling its own in the same page view. Brave had not responded to requests for comment at publication, and the complaints seek an injunction and damages.

The suits open a second front from the one publishers have spent the past year running against model labs directly. OpenAI only last week filed twelve amicus briefs backing fair-use training on the Times' deadline day in the OpenAI case we have been tracking; Anthropic, which Brave is accused of supplying, is already the subject of 360 stories on our tracker in the last 90 days as it races toward an IPO. Brave was founded in 2015 and "has raised roughly $250 million to date, according to private-market trackers," TechCrunch reports.