New York Times sues Brave over AI scraping and paywalls
The New York Times and three other publications have sued Brave, alleging it scraped their sites, sold the content to AI firms and let users skip paywalls.
The facts
- According to The Verge, citing Reuters, the New York Times and other publications have filed lawsuits against Brave Software over alleged unlawful scraping to train AI and letting users bypass paywalls.
- One complaint, filed by the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, claims Brave sells AI companies paid access to real-time content from the Brave Index.
- The complaint alleges Brave supplied copyrighted content to firms including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. These are allegations, not proven findings.
- Brave had not replied to The Verge at the time of publication. Perplexity's communications chief dismissed the suit, saying the Times is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists.
Case notes · Danny's take
Why it matters
Past AI copyright fights mostly targeted the companies that train the models. This one goes after the supplier in the middle. Brave is accused of selling a search index to AI firms, so the question is who is liable when data changes hands. If the publishers win, anyone selling scraped web data has a problem, and so does anyone buying it.
For builders
If your product feeds on scraped or third-party web data, check where that data came from and what rights come with it. Licensing contracts and clean sourcing are becoming part of the product. Watch how the court treats the paywall feature as well, since it is a separate claim from the AI training one.
Not financial advice. Do your own investigation.
This story was summarised with AI from The Verge's reporting and checked against our editorial policy. Danny's take reflects his views. Disclaimer.
Danny Walter
Founder of Moon Republic, Volt Terminal and Moon Republic Academy. Author of The Market Is a Crime Scene and After the Applause.