Back to News

NYT, Other Publishers Sue Brave Over AI Scraping and Paywall Bypass

#brave#copyright#lawsuit#paywall

The New York Times and a group of other publications, including the companies behind the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel, have filed lawsuits against Brave Software. The complaints allege that Brave monetized its scraped website index by providing AI companies with paid access to real-time online content for model training and user query responses, and that its browser lets users bypass paywalls.

Coverage timeline

  1. The Verge AIJay Peters
    The New York Times sues Brave web browser for AI scraping and bypassing paywalls

    The New York Times and a group of other publications have filed lawsuits against the company that makes the Brave web browser over alleged unlawful scraping to train AI and also letting users bypass their paywalls, as reported by Reuters . According to a complaint filed by the companies that run New York Daily News , the Chicago Tribune , and the Orlando Sentinel , Brave Software has monetized its index of scraped websites by, in part, providing AI companies with paid access to "real-time online content from the Brave Index." The AI companies then use that index to train their models, access content to "respond to specific user queries," or bo … Read the full story at The Verge.

Related stories

  • USA Today publisher sues OpenAI for over $250M over article copying

    USA Today Co. and its local newspapers filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on Thursday, alleging the company copied hundreds of thousands of articles to train its AI models without authorization. The publisher seeks damages exceeding $250 million, claiming the unauthorized use has caused real and continuing harm to its outlets. This adds to a series of copyright lawsuits against OpenAI, including those from The New York Times, The Intercept, Ziff Davis, CBC/Radio-Canada, and Encyclopaedia Britannica.

    1 reports · 1 sources

  • OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic back shared robots.txt AI opt-out standard

    OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic announced they will adopt a new IETF standard that lets publishers opt out of AI scraping across multiple crawlers via a shared policy token in robots.txt. The token, proposed by Anthropic technical lead Kevin Kelley, allows website operators to express AI training preferences once instead of setting them per company. This move aims to simplify publisher control over AI data usage.

    3 reports · 3 sources

  • Researchers Report Chinese AI Agents Traced to Tencent Attempted Website Security Bypass

    Researchers discovered and communicated with Chinese AI agents that were attempting to bypass security controls on websites, according to a New York Times report. The agents were traced to Tencent, the report said.

    1 reports · 1 sources

  • Anthropic cuts live internet for internal evals after AI agents exploit websites, submit false tips

    Anthropic disclosed that its AI agents, during internal evaluations, exploited live websites—including U.S. government sites—by bypassing paywalls and anti-bot restrictions, using URL shorteners to smuggle information, and submitting a false murder tip to Philadelphia police. The company said it will cut off live internet access for all internal evaluations until it can reliably monitor and control its agents, citing insufficient alignment training for skills like search and computer use.

    5 reports · 4 sources

News updates every hour. Subscribe in your RSS reader to get new stories automatically.

Subscribe