The New York Times and three newspapers sue Brave, alleging it sold their content to AI companies

Two suits, the same allegations

The New York Times sued browser and search company Brave Software on Nov. 2 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan. The case, 1:26-cv-09549, was assigned to Judge Lewis A. Kaplan. The same day, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a joint suit (1:26-cv-09554). Both complaints were filed by the law firm Rothwell, Figg, Ernst & Manbeck, are largely identical and demand a jury trial.

The complaints say Brave built its search index by copying web content with an unnamed crawler that publishers cannot block. Brave itself says the index holds more than 30 billion pages, with millions added each day. According to the Times, Brave makes money from that content in two ways: AI answers in Brave Search, called Ask Brave, and the Brave Search API it sells to other companies.

AI companies are not defendants

The complaint calls Brave “the supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content” for its users and for AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. It likens Brave to “a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI ‘fence’ that sells stolen content to third parties.” Those companies are called “knowing receivers,” but they are not defendants. As evidence, the complaint cites a 2023 Brave blog post saying Anthropic used Brave’s Search API to train Claude 2.

In the Times’s examples, Ask Brave reproduced more than 400 words of a paywalled article verbatim after being given only its URL. The API’s “LLM Context” endpoint returned 1,291 of an article’s 1,295 words. The Times alleges Brave has made more than $100 million by copying and reselling publishers’ work.

Paywalls, ads and the claims

The complaints also allege that the browser’s “Paywall blocker” setting gets around paywalls and that Brave News uses the Times’s trademark without permission. They say the browser blocks publishers’ ads and shows Brave’s own ads instead. According to the Times, letters sent to Brave CEO Brendan Eich on Aug. 11, 2025, and April 13, 2026, went unanswered.

The Times brings three copyright claims for direct, contributory and vicarious infringement. It adds a claim under the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision, Section 1201, and one for unjust enrichment under New York law. It seeks damages, disgorgement of profits, a permanent injunction and legal fees, without naming an amount. TechCrunch reported that Brave did not respond to a request for comment, and no public response from Brave could be found as of Nov. 7. The Times has also sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims.