TL;DR: The New York Times sued Brave Software on November 2, 2026, in federal court in Manhattan, accusing the privacy-focused browser maker of scraping its journalism into a 30-billion-page search index and selling access to AI companies the suit names as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. The complaint also targets Brave’s “Paywall blocker” browser setting. The New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed a similar suit the same day. These are allegations; Brave had not publicly responded when the suits were reported.
The fight over who pays for the news that powers AI just opened a new front. In the latest case, the New York Times sues Brave, the company behind the Brave browser and Brave Search, rather than an AI lab directly. The Times argues Brave acts as a middleman that copies publishers’ work and resells it to chatbot makers. Here’s what the lawsuits claim, which Brave products are involved and why it matters for AI search.
What the New York Times lawsuit against Brave says
The Times filed its 72-page complaint (case 1:26-cv-09549) in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. It calls Brave “the supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content for its own users and many of the most prominent GenAI companies.” As TechCrunch reported, the suit says Brave “acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI ‘fence’ that sells stolen content to third parties.”
The core allegations in the complaint:
- A hidden crawler: Brave built the Brave Index, which it describes as “over 30 billion webpages,” without disclosing the name of its bot, so site owners had no way to block it.
- A new business model: after making “little headway in the search business,” the complaint says, Brave began monetizing its index around 2023 through AI products.
- Reselling to AI firms: the Brave Search API, which Brave markets as “trusted by the world’s top AI labs,” allegedly gives AI companies paid access to copied content, including Times articles.
- Paywall bypass: a browser setting called “Paywall blocker,” which Brave promotes as letting users “Bypass Paywalls,” allegedly lists The Times among the “hundreds of top publishers” it works on.
- Ads: the suit says Brave blocks publishers’ ads while showing its own.
- Money: the Times claims Brave “has made more than $100 million by copying and reselling publishers’ work without consent,” while publishers received nothing.
The five legal claims
| Count | Claim | What it targets |
|---|---|---|
| I | Direct copyright infringement | Copying Times content into the Brave Index and serving it through Ask Brave and the API |
| II | Contributory copyright infringement | Allegedly enabling users’ and AI customers’ copying |
| III | Vicarious copyright infringement | Allegedly controlling and profiting from that copying |
| IV | DMCA anti-circumvention (17 U.S.C. § 1201) | The Paywall blocker and other ways of getting around access controls |
| V | Unjust enrichment under New York law | Profits Brave allegedly made from the content |
The Times asks for statutory and actual damages, restitution of profits, a permanent injunction and a jury trial.
Which Brave products are named
Ask Brave
Ask Brave is the AI answer feature built into Brave Search. According to the complaint, it began as “Summarizer” and was renamed in 2025. The Times argues it gives “comprehensive answers” by copying publishers’ pages instead of sending readers to them.
Brave Search API
This is the product at the heart of the AI angle. The complaint quotes Brave marketing that says the API is used by AI companies and cites a 2023 Brave blog post stating that “Anthropic used Brave’s Search API to train their latest model, Claude 2.” It also points to API services built for AI, such as news search and an “LLM Context” service for AI agents and chatbots.
Brave browser and Leo
The browser’s Paywall blocker setting and its built-in assistant, Leo, which can summarize a webpage, are both cited as ways users get Times content without a subscription.
The second lawsuit from three newspapers
On the same day, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed their own suit against Brave in the same court. The Verge reports that complaint says Brave has monetized its index partly by giving AI companies paid access to “real-time online content from the Brave Index,” which those companies use to train models, answer user queries, or both.
Steven Lieberman, the attorney who filed that suit, told The Verge: “Buying stolen goods secondhand doesn’t make them legitimate. Brave must be held responsible for laundering pirated reporting for the AI industry.” Lieberman’s name also appears on the Times complaint.
What each side has said
- The New York Times: spokesperson Graham James told The Verge that “Brave has flouted established copyright law and ignored repeated requests by The Times to stop its infringing conduct.”
- Brave: did not immediately respond to requests for comment from TechCrunch or The Verge.
- Perplexity: chief communications officer Jesse Dwyer told The Verge, “The New York Times is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists.”
- Anthropic, Mistral and Cohere: had not replied to The Verge’s requests for comment at the time of its report. None of the AI companies is a defendant.
Why this case matters
The Times has already sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims, according to TechCrunch. Going after Brave tests a different theory: that a search provider supplying web data to AI companies can be liable as the source. If that holds, AI firms that rely on third-party search APIs for live answers could face new pressure to license news content directly.
The crawler allegation also ties into a bigger industry debate over how publishers can opt out of AI use. Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic recently backed a shared opt-out signal, which we explained in our robots.txt AI training opt-out guide. Opt-out tools only work if crawlers identify themselves, which is exactly what the Times says Brave didn’t do. Meanwhile, AI answers are already cutting publisher traffic, as our report on Google’s AI Overviews shows.
What happens next
Brave will have a chance to respond in court, and it may argue that indexing and search are lawful or that its products fall under fair use. Lawsuits like this often take years. Brave, founded in 2015, has raised about $250 million according to private-market trackers cited by TechCrunch. Watch for Brave’s formal response, any motion to dismiss and whether other publishers join.
Bottom line
The New York Times lawsuit against Brave shifts the AI copyright fight from model makers to the data pipelines behind them. The claims are serious, but they’re still allegations, and Brave hasn’t yet given its side. Whatever the outcome, it could shape how AI tools get the news they summarize for you. For more on how these systems use outside data, see our explainer on RAG in AI.
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