Every time I try to download something with Brave I get a message “Virus scan failed”. I have tried turning off anti-virus software, and that doesn’t help. I can also download items in Firefox.
Go to brave://settings/security in Brave settings, and test if changing to “No protection” resolves the problem.
Brave’s Safe Browsing protection is described at Safe Browsing in Brave while Google’s Safebrowsing is described at [Safebrowsing].(https://safebrowsing.google.com/). Both mention download protection, but I suspect what really happens is bad sites are blocked, so you cannot get downloads from those bad sites, not that downloads themselves are scanned.
If Brave’s Safe Browsing (anonymized to Google’s Safebrowsing) is enabled, you didn’t get a bad site warning before you visited there (to then get a download)? Or were you clicking on a direct link to a file?