On Monday, major media outlets including the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and other associated newspapers initiated federal legal action in Manhattan against Brave Software. They accuse the tech firm of employing advanced scraping technology to illegally extract news content from their websites, which it allegedly then resells to artificial intelligence companies, such as Anthropic and Perplexity.
The complaint, lodged in a Federal Court in Manhattan by the listed news organizations and their affiliated publications like the Daily News and the Orlando Sentinel, characterizes Brave as “the supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content.” It claims the company provides users—and notable generative AI firms—with access to premium content without authorization, effectively bypassing paywalls to exploit their proprietary news.
The lawsuit states, “Brave operates like a burglar who appropriates publishers' content while also acting as an AI ‘fence’ that sells this stolen material for profit.” It further alleges that these companies knowingly accept the purloined content as they construct their lucrative businesses.
According to the lawsuit, Brave has indexed and replicated content from over 30 billion webpages without notifying website owners or offering a means to block its crawling activities. The accusations extend to Brave’s web browser, which allegedly enables users to access paywalled copyrighted content, a significant revenue source for news outlets striving to produce high-quality content amid a rapidly changing media landscape.
This legal action adds to a series of emerging lawsuits filed nationwide by various news organizations against tech giants, claiming they are unlawfully using copyrighted material to train AI technologies. The plaintiffs, including The News and The Times, are also pursuing legal claims against OpenAI and Microsoft for similar alleged misconduct.
In one specific instance cited in the new complaint, users of Brave’s AI function, called “Ask Brave,” were prompted to access articles published that day by The News. The feature provided titles of 35 paywalled articles and asked whether users wanted access to the full texts, suggesting that it could retrieve complete versions upon request.
“The desperation of AI companies to evade accountability for stealing news content is evident, and Brave Software is providing them with a backdoor to journalism that they have no legal claim to. Purchasing stolen content doesn’t legitimize it. Brave must be held accountable for facilitating this piracy in the AI sector,” asserted Steven Lieberman, the attorney representing The News and its Tribune Publishing affiliates.
The lawsuit outlines five legal allegations, claiming that Brave has engaged in direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement.
Frank Pine, Executive Editor at Tribune Publishing and MediaNews Group, criticized Brave for undermining intellectual property laws. He stated, “Brave, ostensibly advocating for its users and other well-known AI firms, exploits the internet and markets its ill-gotten content to anyone willing to pay. They boast about protecting privacy—though it may actually reflect their commitment to piracy—while attempting to erase evidence of their wrongdoing through their supposed ‘Zero Data Retention’ policy.”
Efforts to obtain commentary from Brave Software, Inc., were made, although Anthropic and other AI firms implicated in acquiring purportedly misappropriated content from Brave are not named as defendants in this latest lawsuit.
