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Lawsuit Alleges Brave Scraped Over 30 Billion Webpages and Sold Journalism to AI Companies

November 6, 2026 at 20:30 EST

Policy & Regulation

A lawsuit alleges that the browser company Brave used an undisclosed web crawler to copy more than 30 billion webpages, including news content, and then sold that scraped journalism to AI developers including Anthropic, xAI and Perplexity.

Lawsuit · Brave browser · Web scraping

Lawsuit alleges Brave copied 30 billion pages and resold scraped journalism to AI developers

The complaint says an undisclosed crawler gathered news content at massive scale and sold it to Anthropic, xAI and Perplexity. Publishers, it argues, had no way to block the crawler because it never identified itself. No ruling has been reported.

30B+

Webpages allegedly copied by the crawler

AI developers named as recipients of the scraped content

Crawler names disclosed, per the complaint as described

Scale of the alleged copying

Each block represents 1 billion webpages, drawn to scale (30 blocks = 30 billion).

Takeaway: the alleged haul is 30 billion pages, with the exact scope still to be tested in court.

How the alleged business model works

1. Crawl
Undisclosed crawler copies pages, including news

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2. Resell
Scraped journalism is allegedly sold as a middleman

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3. Supply AI labs
Anthropic, xAI and Perplexity are named buyers

Publishers' position

Scraping journalism at scale is said to erode subscription and ad revenue.
Undisclosed crawlers defeat robots.txt and user-agent controls.
Publishers allegedly had no practical way to stop the copying.

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