23 Daily — According to techcrunch.com, on November 2, 2026, The New York Times filed a lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan against privacy-focused browser company Brave. The suit accuses Brave of scraping The New York Times' copyrighted content without authorization and unlawfully distributing it to AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere for AI training. On the same day, other media outlets including the Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel filed similar lawsuits.
Controversial Features and Accusations Against Brave Browser
The plaintiffs state that Brave used an unidentified web crawler to build an index of over 30 billion web pages, bypassing publishers' blocking measures and preventing them from stopping data scraping. The Brave browser also includes a feature that bypasses news site paywalls and blocks publishers' ads while selling its own advertisements, allegedly harming publishers' interests. The suit characterizes Brave as both a “burglar” misappropriating publisher content and an AI “fence” selling stolen content to third parties.
Legal Background and Potential Industry Impact
The New York Times has previously brought similar lawsuits against AI companies such as OpenAI and Perplexity over copyright-related concerns, reflecting traditional media's increasing demand for copyright protection in AI training data usage. Brave, founded in 2015, has raised about 50 million to date, and this case could trigger broader discussions between tech and media industries on the legality of AI training data use and affect related business models. The lawsuit seeks an injunction and damages. Brave has not responded publicly to the suit.
Editor's take: Licensing Challenges and Validation Paths for Entrepreneurs
This lawsuit highlights the importance for startups developing AI applications based on web data to carefully consider copyright issues. If products or services involve large-scale scraping of third-party data, companies should proactively assess legal compliance and seek proper authorization to avoid infringement risks. Entrepreneurs can validate their business models by auditing data source licenses or utilizing publicly licensed datasets for training. As regulations around AI training data usage intensify, possessing clearly authorized content resources will become a competitive advantage.