The New York Times initiated legal action against Brave, the decade-old privacy-centric browser developer, on Monday. The lawsuit accuses the company of scraping copyrighted material from the outlet and illegally distributing it to clients identified as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.
Concurrently, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel filed identical filings. Both lawsuits were submitted to federal court in Manhattan.
The New York Times, which has previously filed similar claims against OpenAI and Perplexity, characterizes Brave as a "supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" for artificial intelligence firms.
The legal document states, "In this way, Brave acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content to third parties." It further alleges that Brave constructed an index comprising over 30 billion webpages using an unidentifiable crawler, thereby preventing publishers from blocking the collection.
The suit also highlights a Brave browser function designed to bypass paywalls and criticizes the company's strategy of blocking publisher advertisements while monetizing its own.
Since its establishment in 2015, Brave has secured approximately $250 million in funding, according to private market trackers. The Times is seeking an injunction and monetary damages.
As of press time, Brave had not responded to a request for comment.
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