NEW YORK – The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Brave on November 2, alleging the company copied more than 30 billion webpages and sold the content to artificial intelligence firms without proper identification or blocking mechanisms.
The legal action highlights escalating tensions over copyright, web crawling ethics, and publisher control as AI companies increasingly rely on extensive datasets for training their models.
Brave sells access to its search index, which contains more than 30 billion pages, to AI companies such as Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity, and You.com through its Brave Search API, according to the complaint. The New York Times asserted that Brave’s crawler does not use a differentiated user agent, making it difficult for websites to block its activity via robots.txt without also blocking legitimate crawlers like Googlebot.
The lawsuit by The New York Times also named Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere as AI companies supplied by Brave, though these entities were not sued directly.
Other publishers, including the Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel, filed separate cases against Brave on the same day as The New York Times, according to court documents. These actions signal a broader industry concern regarding the unauthorized use of published content for commercial AI applications.
Simon Willison, a prominent web developer and data expert, has previously discussed the implications of crawlers that do not identify themselves, noting the challenges this poses for content creators seeking to manage access to their intellectual property.
Slobodan Manic, a legal expert specializing in digital rights, stated that such lawsuits could set precedents for how AI companies acquire and utilize data from the open web.
The New York Times stated in its complaint that Brave’s practices undermine its ability to control and monetize its journalistic output, which is important for its business model.
Source: Search Engine Journal
