New York Times and Publishers Sue Brave Browser Over AI Scraping and Paywall Bypassing
The NYT and other publishers allege Brave sold scraped-site access to Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere for AI training and queries. Filed in November 2026, the lawsuits also target Brave’s advertised paywall-blocking feature.
The New York Times and a group of other media companies filed lawsuits in November 2026 against Brave Software, the company behind the Brave web browser, alleging unlawful scraping of their content to train AI models and enabling users to bypass their paywalls.
The lawsuit was also brought by companies that operate the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel. According to the complaint, Brave Software built an index of scraped websites and monetized it by selling paid access to AI companies — including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere — which then used the content to train models or respond to user queries. The complaint describes this material as “stolen copyrighted content.”
Beyond AI scraping, the publishers allege that Brave actively promotes a “Paywall blocker” feature in its browser, advertising “hundreds of top publishers” as accessible through it. The complaint states that Brave “has never asked for the Publishers’ permission to access their websites, much less to copy the material and provide it to users or other AI companies” and has never compensated them for the use of their content.
“While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, Brave has flouted established copyright law and ignored repeated requests by The Times to stop its infringing conduct,” said Graham James, a spokesperson for the NYT. “We filed this lawsuit to hold Brave accountable for stealing our content to power its own products and to provide it to some of the most prominent and well resourced generative AI companies in the world.”
Brave, Anthropic, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Perplexity’s chief communications officer, Jesse Dwyer, disputed the claims, saying in a statement: “The New York Times is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists. (Who could’ve easily identified the disinformation in this suit.)”
The case may have broad implications for how browser makers and AI companies access and use publisher content, particularly as legal pressure around AI training data continues to mount.