The New York Times sues Brave over AI scraping and paywall bypassing

In short: The New York Times and other publishers have sued Brave, saying it copied their articles for AI use and helped people get around paywalls.

What happened

The New York Times and a group of other publications filed lawsuits against Brave Software, the company behind the Brave web browser. The publishers say Brave unlawfully “scraped” their websites. Scraping means automatically copying lots of web pages, like using a fast robot to read and save huge parts of the internet.

The lawsuits also focus on Brave’s “Paywall blocker” feature. A paywall is the screen that asks you to subscribe before reading an article. The publishers say Brave let users bypass paywalls without permission and took steps that made it harder for publishers to block Brave from accessing their sites.

In one complaint, companies that run the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel say Brave made money from an index of scraped websites called the “Brave Index.” An index is like a searchable library catalog of web pages. They claim Brave sold AI companies paid access to “real-time online content” from that index, and that the AI companies used it to train AI models or answer user questions. The complaint names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere as companies that allegedly received this content.

A New York Times spokesperson said the paper supports ethical AI development, but alleges Brave ignored copyright law and repeated requests to stop.

Why it matters

These cases could help set clearer rules for how browsers and AI companies can collect and reuse online articles. For regular readers, it also affects who pays for news and whether subscriptions can be easily bypassed.

Source: The Verge AI