Newspaper owners make a complaint about Brave data sold to AI firms

The companies that operate the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a complaint against Brave Software. Brave makes a web browser and keeps an index, a copy of scraped website pages. The complaint says Brave sells AI companies access for money to “real-time online content from the Brave Index”. It says this content is stolen and has a copyright.

How it works

The complaint says Brave scrapes websites. It copies pages with software. Brave then sells access to the index. AI companies use it to train models or to answer user questions, or to do the two.

The proof

The only proof in the source is the complaint. It says that many AI companies got the content. It names these companies:

• Anthropic
• Perplexity
• Mistral
• xAI
• Cohere

What is not known

The source gives no reply from Brave or from the five AI companies. The claims come from the publishers. The source does not tell the step that the publishers want from the court.

Insight: The complaint targets the seller of data, not only AI makers

The complaint is against Brave, the seller of the index. In the complaint, the five AI companies are only buyers. The publishers seem to go after the supplier in the middle, where one claim touches many AI firms. If you buy web data for AI, your vendor is the first target.