The New York Times Sues Brave, Saying Its Search API Sells Scraped Journalism to AI Companies
The New York Times sued Brave Software in federal court in Manhattan on November 2, alleging that Brave scraped Times journalism into an index of more than 30 billion webpages and sells access to it through Ask Brave and its Search API, including to AI companies the complaint names as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. It also targets Brave's 'Paywall blocker'. Three other papers filed a similar suit the same day. These are allegations; Brave had not responded.
The newest front in the publishers' fight over AI training is not a model maker but a supplier. The New York Times sued Brave Software on Monday, November 2, in federal court in Manhattan, alleging that the browser company scraped Times journalism without permission and resells it to AI companies through its search products. The complaint calls Brave "the supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" for "many of the most prominent GenAI companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere." These are allegations in a complaint; no court has ruled on them.
What the Times alleges#
According to the complaint, Brave's index holds "over 30 billion webpages," built with a crawler that publishers could not identify and so could not block. The Times says Brave uses that index in two ways: in Ask Brave, an AI answer feature inside Brave Search that it says copies publishers' work into long answers instead of sending readers to their sites, and in the Brave Search API, which it says Brave sells to AI developers for training and for answering user queries.
The suit also targets a browser setting called "Paywall blocker," which the Times says Brave promotes as letting users "Bypass Paywalls," and lists the Times among the "hundreds of top publishers" it covers. It accuses Brave of blocking publishers' ads while selling its own.
The Times brings claims of direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement and of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing access controls. It alleges that Brave "has made more than $100 million by copying and reselling publishers' work," and it seeks an injunction and damages, TechCrunch reported.
A second suit, and the reaction#
Separately on Monday, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar lawsuit in the same court, according to TechCrunch and The Verge. The Verge quotes that complaint as saying Brave sells AI companies paid access to "real-time online content from the Brave Index."
Brave did not immediately respond to requests for comment from TechCrunch or The Verge. The AI companies named in the complaint are not defendants. Perplexity's chief communications officer, Jesse Dwyer, told The Verge that the Times "is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists."
The Times has also sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims. Its case against OpenAI is part of the consolidated copyright litigation where friend-of-the-court briefs landed on October 30.
Limits#
- Everything about Brave's conduct, revenue and customers here comes from the complaints. Brave had not answered the claims when we published.
- The complaint relies partly on Brave's own marketing for its list of AI customers; it does not show what any named company received or how it used it.
- We read the Times complaint in full. We have not read the Daily News, Tribune and Sentinel complaint and rely on The Verge's and TechCrunch's accounts of it.
Sources#
- The New York Times Company v. Brave Software, Inc., complaint, S.D.N.Y. Case 1:26-cv-09549 (filed November 2, 2026)
- TechCrunch: New York Times and other outlets sue web browser Brave over alleged content scraping (November 2, 2026)
- The Verge: The New York Times sues Brave web browser for AI scraping and bypassing paywalls (November 2, 2026)