NEW YORK — The New York Times and other American newspapers sued Brave Software on Monday, 2 November 2026, accusing the privacy-focused browser maker of scraping their copyrighted articles to supply artificial intelligence companies and of helping readers get around their paywalls.
The lawsuits, filed in federal court in Manhattan, open a new front in the publishing industry's fight over how AI systems obtain the journalism they learn from — and they aim not at a chatbot maker, but at a supplier further up the chain: the company that crawls the web, indexes it, and sells access to what it finds.
Illustration: A federal courthouse with newspapers and a laptop on its steps. This is an illustration, not a photograph of a real event.
What Happened
A group of newspapers, including The New York Times and the New York Daily News, filed suit against Brave Software in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on Monday, Reuters reported. The cases are New York Times Co v. Brave Software Inc, No. 1:26-cv-09549, and Daily News LP v. Brave Software Inc, No. 1:26-cv-09554.
The complaints allege that Brave illegally scraped the newspapers' articles and sold that content to AI companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity and xAI, which are not defendants in the cases, according to Reuters. Reports describing the complaints say the named AI customers also include Mistral and Cohere.
"While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, Brave has flouted established copyright law and ignored repeated requests by The New York Times to stop its infringing conduct," Times spokesperson Graham James said in a statement reported by Reuters.
Spokespeople for Brave, Anthropic, Perplexity and xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment, Reuters reported. The newspapers are represented by Steven Lieberman of Rothwell Figg Ernst & Manbeck, according to the Reuters report; attorney information for Brave was not yet available.
The language of the complaints is unusually blunt. The lawsuits say Brave "acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content to third parties," Reuters reported. The Times is seeking a court order to stop the alleged conduct and damages, according to reports on the complaint.
Beyond the scraping claims, the complaints take aim at two features of Brave's browser business. Reports describing the filings say Brave's browser blocks advertising by default, strips publishers' advertising from their own pages, and includes a default setting described as a paywall blocker that lets users read shielded content without subscribing. The complaints reportedly include screenshots said to show an article blocked by a subscription prompt in another browser being viewable through Brave without logging in or paying.
According to reports on the complaint, the Times sent Brave a cease-and-desist letter on 11 August 2025, followed by a second letter on 13 April 2026, before filing suit. The complaint is also reported to say the Times had more than 13 million subscribers as of 30 June 2026 and owns more than 10 million registered, copyrighted works.
Background
Brave, founded in 2015, built its reputation as a privacy-first alternative to mainstream browsers, blocking trackers and advertising by default and paying users in a cryptocurrency token for viewing privacy-respecting ads. It later expanded into search: Brave Search, built on its own index, and Leo, a built-in AI assistant that can summarise web pages, alongside an AI feature called Ask Brave added to Brave Search in 2025, according to reports describing the complaint.
Illustration: Web pages flowing through data streams into an AI network. This is an illustration, not a photograph of a real event.
The complaints allege that this search business is, in effect, a pipeline for AI training and retrieval. According to reports on the filings, Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages using a crawler it does not identify, leaving publishers with no way to block it, and monetised that index by selling AI companies paid access to real-time online content. The AI companies are said to use the index both to train models and to retrieve content when answering user questions — a technique known as retrieval-augmented generation. The filings reportedly say Brave Search answers more than 50 million queries a day, that its search API handles billions of calls a week, and that about a third of Brave Search queries lead to an AI-generated response.
The new cases land in the middle of a much larger legal war over AI and copyright. The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, alleging that millions of its articles were used without authorisation to train the models behind ChatGPT and that the resulting products can reproduce or closely imitate protected material. That case, consolidated with related publisher suits, remains before the same Manhattan court. In September 2026 the US Department of Justice filed a brief backing OpenAI's argument that training AI models on copyrighted works can qualify as fair use, calling such training highly transformative — a position that does not decide the case but gives the AI companies a powerful institutional ally. OpenAI published a further public defence of fair use on 30 October 2026, arguing that courts should reject what it called an attempt to expand copyright to block the statistical analysis of texts during training.
Other copyright owners have pursued similar claims against generative AI companies over the use of their material for training, and the Brave complaints extend that logic one step further: if an AI company can be liable for training on copied work, the newspapers argue, so can the intermediary that gathered and sold the copies.
Why It Matters
The Brave case matters because it tests whether liability in the AI supply chain stops at the model maker or reaches the data suppliers behind it. Search indexes have historically enjoyed broad legal shelter: search engines copy web pages to index them, and courts have generally treated that as fair use. The newspapers' argument is that Brave's index is different — not a public search tool that sends readers to publishers, but a commercial feed sold to AI companies whose products can answer questions without sending readers anywhere.
That distinction, if accepted by a court, could ripple far beyond Brave. Dozens of companies crawl the web and sell data, and AI firms increasingly rely on real-time retrieval as well as training data. A ruling that selling indexed content to AI firms counts as distributing copied work would force data vendors to seek licences, filter publisher content, or rethink their business models — and it could encourage other rights holders to target intermediaries rather than only the best-known AI labs.
Illustration: A news article on a screen blocked by a padlock paywall barrier. This is an illustration, not a photograph of a real event.
The paywall claims strike at a second pressure point: the subscription model that now funds much of American journalism. If a browser feature that bypasses paywalls is found to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on circumventing technological protection measures, browsers and extensions that offer similar tools could face new legal risk. Brave is likely to argue, if it responds as other technology defendants have, that its tools are general-purpose software with lawful uses and that publishers remain free to use technical measures of their own — arguments a court has not yet tested in this case.
For readers, the stakes are less abstract. The outcome could shape whether AI answers continue to draw freely on fresh journalism, whether publishers can charge AI firms for that access, and whether subscription barriers hold up when browsers offer ways around them. None of those questions will be settled quickly: copyright cases of this kind typically take years, and the Brave suits are at the very first stage.
What Happens Next
Brave has yet to respond publicly to the complaints, and no hearing date has been reported. The company's first formal step will be to answer the complaints or move to dismiss them, and the newspapers' most consequential claims — direct and secondary copyright infringement, DMCA violations, and unjust enrichment, according to an analysis of the Daily News complaint — will be tested against defences including fair use.
Watch for three things in the coming weeks: whether Brave issues a public response or changes any browser feature while the case is pending; whether any of the AI companies named as customers — Anthropic, Perplexity, xAI, Mistral or Cohere — intervene or are drawn into discovery even though they are not defendants; and whether other publishers file similar suits against data suppliers, which would signal that the industry sees the intermediary strategy as its next legal front.
Meanwhile, the parallel Times case against OpenAI and Microsoft continues in the same court, and its eventual ruling on fair use for AI training will cast a long shadow over the Brave litigation. For now, the message from the newspaper industry is unmistakable: in its view, the AI copyright fight is no longer only about the companies that build the models — it is about everyone who feeds them.
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FAQ
Why is The New York Times suing Brave Software?
The Times alleges Brave scraped its copyrighted articles, built a search index of more than 30 billion web pages from that material, and sold access to AI companies, while also offering a browser feature that bypasses publisher paywalls.
Which AI companies are named in the complaints?
Reuters names Anthropic, Perplexity and xAI as companies to which Brave allegedly sold content; reports describing the complaints also name Mistral and Cohere. None of the AI companies is a defendant in these cases.
What is Brave accused of doing with paywalls?
The complaints allege Brave's browser includes a paywall-blocking setting that lets users read subscription-shielded articles without logging in or paying, and that it blocks publishers' advertising while selling its own.
Has Brave responded to the lawsuits?
As reported by Reuters on 2 November 2026, spokespeople for Brave and the named AI companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment. No court ruling has been made.
How does this case relate to the Times lawsuit against OpenAI?
The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023 over alleged use of its articles to train AI models. The Brave case extends the same copyright theory to a data supplier, arguing that gathering and selling the content is itself infringement.
Sources
Reuters, "New York Times sues maker of Brave web browser over copyrights," 2 November 2026; reports describing the complaints in The Verge, TechCrunch and other outlets covering the filings, 2 November 2026; Reuters, "OpenAI, Microsoft executives' quotes on AI training threaten copyright defense, news outlets argue," 17 September 2026; Reason, "DOJ sides with OpenAI in New York Times copyright lawsuit," 4 September 2026; OpenAI, "Fair use benefits everyone," 30 October 2026.
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