Newspapers sue Brave for reselling scraped content to AI firms
Tribune Publishing and the New York Times claim the browser maker acted as a dealer for stolen articles used by Anthropic and Perplexity.
By Lucas Navarro ·
The News, the New York Times, and affiliated newspapers filed federal lawsuits in Manhattan on Monday against Brave Software. The plaintiffs accuse the technology company of illegally scraping their websites for exclusive news stories and reselling that content to major artificial intelligence firms. The complaints name Anthropic and Perplexity as key buyers of the material.
The Manhattan federal court documents describe Brave as a supplier and distributor of stolen copyrighted content. They allege the company provides a back door that circumvents paywalls for its own users and for generative AI companies. One complaint states that Brave acts like a burglar that misappropriates publisher content and an AI fence that sells it to third parties. Those third parties are described as knowing receivers of the stolen content, which they used to build their trillion dollar businesses.
The suit details how Brave crawled and copied content from more than 30 billion webpages in its index. The plaintiffs claim the company did not identify itself or provide website owners with any mechanism to block its crawler. Beyond selling copies of the stories to other companies, Brave also provides free access to paywalled content through its own browser. This practice undermines a critical revenue source for news organizations seeking to compete by producing original content, according to Frank Pine, executive editor at Tribune Publishing and MediaNews Group.
The new cases join a growing number of lawsuits across the country. News organizations and other copyright owners are suing tech giants over the wholesale theft of content used to train AI models. The News, The Times, and other papers that filed suit on Monday are also suing OpenAI and Microsoft for similar conduct.
The complaint includes specific examples of Brave’s AI feature, Ask Brave, regurgitating paywalled stories. In one instance, a user prompted the feature to show articles published that day in The News. The chatbot provided titles for 35 paywalled articles and offered to pull up the full text. In another example, a user asked about Orlando politics. The bot identified several stories, citing the Orlando Sentinel, and reproduced verbatim and closely paraphrased text from the newspaper’s coverage after further prompting.
Steven Lieberman, an attorney representing The News and its sister papers with Tribune Publishing, said AI giants are desperate to avoid being caught stealing news. He claimed Brave is selling them a back door to journalism they know they have no right to. Lieberman argued that buying stolen goods secondhand does not make them legitimate and that Brave must be held responsible for laundering pirated reporting.
The suit lists five legal claims. These include allegations of direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement. In a statement, Pine said the software company had made a mockery of intellectual property laws. He noted that Brave pillages the internet and resells its ill-gotten gains while touting privacy protections, which he read as piracy. He also claimed the company attempts to delete evidence of its misdeeds under its Zero Data Retention policy.
Brave Software, Inc., did not respond to a request for comment. The News also reached out to Anthropic and other AI companies accused of buying stolen content from Brave. Those companies are not named as defendants in the lawsuits filed on Monday.
