Publishers take the AI scraping fight to Brave

The publishers’ AI copyright fight now reaches Brave, the company behind the privacy-focused browser and search service. The New York Times sued the company on November 2, alleging that it scraped copyrighted reporting and unlawfully distributed it to AI customers, according to TechCrunch’s original English report.

TechCrunch names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as customers identified in the Times’ suit. Their appearance in that reported allegation is not a court finding that any of them, or Brave, infringed copyright.

The report also says the Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed a separate, similar lawsuit that Monday. Both cases were brought in federal court in Manhattan, according to TechCrunch.

The dispute reaches the content supply chain

The Times’ allegations, as described by TechCrunch, focus on more than a chatbot’s final answer. The publisher says Brave built an index of more than 30 billion webpages with an unidentified crawler, preventing publishers from blocking it, and supplied content to other AI companies. That index figure is a claim reported from the suit, not an independently audited count.

The report says the complaint also targets a browser feature alleged to bypass paywalls and Brave’s practice of blocking publishers’ advertising while selling its own. These remain the publisher’s allegations. This article relies on TechCrunch’s account and does not claim a separate review of the court filings.

The Times seeks an injunction and damages. TechCrunch said Brave had not immediately responded to a request for comment at the time of its report.

For the AI industry, the development broadens the dispute from model developers and answer engines to an alleged upstream content supplier. The filing does not settle whether Brave’s indexing, distribution or browser features are lawful, and the reviewed report establishes no judgment or damages award.