Four U.S. newspapers sue Brave: scraping news to sell to AI companies and helping users bypass paywalls.

Beating AI News Flash: The New York Times, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel have each filed two lawsuits, accusing Brave of unauthorized scraping of news content and then providing it through a paid API to AI companies such as Anthropic, Perplexity, and Mistral for model training or answering user questions.

Brave's LLM Context API can directly return the full text of web pages. Plaintiff testing found that for a 1,295-word New York Times article, the API returned 1,291 words, nearly the entire text. Brave's own AI search has also been accused of extensively reproducing news content. The browser also has a built-in paywall blocker that can help users bypass some media outlets' paywalls.

Brave's search engine has indexed more than 30 billion web pages, but its crawler does not identify itself and instead disguises itself as an ordinary browser when visiting websites. Brave explains that some websites only allow Google to crawl content, so it uses this method to avoid being blocked.

Brave previously took the initiative to sue News Corp, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, arguing that search indexing and summaries constitute fair use. News Corp filed a counterclaim in July of this year. Now the four newspaper publishers are asking the court to prohibit Brave's related conduct and order it to pay damages.