NYT Sues Brave Over AI Scraping and Paywalls
The New York Times and three other papers sued Brave, accusing it of scraping their journalism and selling it to AI firms. Here is what the cases claim.
The New York Times has sued Brave Software, the company behind the privacy-focused Brave browser, accusing it of copying the newspaper's journalism without permission and selling access to it to artificial intelligence companies. The publishers of the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a second, similar lawsuit on the same day. Both cases were filed on Monday, November 2, 2026, in federal court in Manhattan, and both put the business of supplying web data to AI firms on trial.
The two lawsuits
The Times filed its complaint against Brave in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Hours later, the companies behind the Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed their own near-identical suit in the same court. The AI companies named in the filings - Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere - are described as customers of Brave's data, not as defendants. The Times says it holds more than 10 million registered copyrighted works, including material from The Athletic, Cooking, Games and Wirecutter. The three other papers say their registered newspaper issues contain more than 2 million articles. Each complaint brings five counts: direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, anti-circumvention under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and unjust enrichment. The Times is seeking an injunction and damages.
The 30-billion-page index
At the centre of both cases is the Brave Index, the collection of web pages behind Brave Search. The publishers say it holds more than 30 billion web pages, gathered by a crawler Brave has never named, so site owners had no way to detect or block it specifically. Brave then sold paid access to real-time content from that index through its Brave Search API, the filings say, for use in training AI models or grounding answers to user queries. The Times describes Brave in blunt language, calling it a "supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" for AI companies. The complaint 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 filings also point to Brave's Ask Brave answer tool, which feeds indexed content to a language model and returns answers that the publishers say can include verbatim text or detailed summaries. The Tribune papers say Ask Brave reproduced more than 1,200 words of a Chicago Tribune article on data-centre tax breaks and nearly 600 words of a Daily News article on Central Park horse carriages.
The paywall claim
The lawsuits also target a Brave browser setting the publishers call a "Paywall blocker", which they say lets users read subscription articles without logging in. The Times suit also criticises Brave's practice of blocking publishers' ads while selling its own advertising in the same page view. The Times says it wrote twice to Brave chief executive Brendan Eich - in August 2025 and again in April 2026 - demanding that the alleged conduct stop, and that it received no response. The April 2026 letter argued the alleged wilful infringement warranted enhanced statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringement.
What Brave and the AI firms say
Brave, founded in 2015 and reported to have raised about $250 million, had not responded publicly to the filings by the morning of November 3. Perplexity, one of the AI firms named as a Brave customer, did respond. Its chief communications officer, Jesse Dwyer, dismissed the suit, saying the Times was "overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists." The other named AI companies had not commented.
Why this case is different
The Times has sued AI companies before - OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, and Perplexity in December 2025. The Brave case is different because it targets a middleman that supplies several AI labs at once, rather than a single chatbot maker. If the publishers win, the ruling could reach the data pipelines that many AI companies rely on, not just one company's product. It also arrives as publishers keep pushing in court: in October, Canada's biggest papers sued Anthropic, even as a judge threw out AI Overviews suits against Google.
What happens next
For now, everything in the filings remains an allegation. No court has ruled on the merits, Brave has yet to answer, and neither filing says the company has changed its index, API or paywall feature. The Brave browser, its search engine and the AI tools that use its index keep working while the case moves through court, a process that could take years. The next step to watch is Brave's formal response, and whether any of the AI firms named as customers change how they source web data.
Sources
TechCrunch - https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/02/new-york-times-and-other-outlets-sue-web-browser-brave-over-alleged-content-scraping/ Unite.AI - https://www.unite.ai/brave-faces-two-publisher-lawsuits-over-ai-use-of-news-content/ Adgully - https://www.adgully.com/post/23299/nyt-tribune-papers-file-copyright-lawsuit-against-brave-software