The New York Times and other publications sue Brave over sharing articles with AI companies
The New York Times and other publications have filed lawsuits against Brave's developer, accusing it of illegally collecting materials for AI and bypassing paid access restrictions.
The New York Times and three other American newspapers have filed lawsuits against Brave Software—the company developing the Brave browser and its namesake search service. The publications claim that the company collected their materials without permission, provided them to AI developers, and helped users bypass paid subscription restrictions.
The New York Times filed a separate lawsuit. Another lawsuit was filed by the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel.
The complaints specifically target Brave's search index, Brave Index. According to the plaintiffs, Brave sells access to collected internet content to AI companies, which is then used for training models or preparing responses to user queries.
The complaint lists Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere among the recipients of the materials. The newspapers state that they did not grant permission for such use of their publications and received no compensation.
Another point of contention is the Paywall Blocker feature, which Brave promotes as a tool for accessing paywalled content. The plaintiffs also allege that the company took measures to hinder publishers from restricting content collection from their websites.
Graham James, a representative of The New York Times, stated that the publication repeatedly asked Brave to stop the disputed use of journalistic materials, but the company ignored the requests.
Brave and most of the mentioned AI companies did not respond to The Verge's inquiry by the time of publication. Jesse Dwyer, a representative of Perplexity, rejected the claims outlined in the lawsuit, calling them misinformation.
The legal proceedings address not only the training of neural networks but also AI services' access to recent publications via search engines. The court will have to assess the publishers' accusations and the legality of Brave's contested practices.
