The New York Times Sues Brave, Saying It Scraped Articles and Sold Them to AI Companies

The New York Times Company sued Brave Software in federal court in Manhattan on November 2, 2026, alleging that the browser maker scraped Times journalism and sold it to AI companies through its Search API. The complaint calls Brave "a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content to third parties."

The same day, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar suit through the same law firm, Rothwell, Figg, Ernst & Manbeck. Reuters reported the filings first, according to The Verge. The cases add a new target to the AI copyright fights that publishers have so far aimed mostly at model makers: a company that sells search results to them.

What does the Times accuse Brave of?

The Times accuses Brave of copying its articles into a search index without permission and then reselling that content in three ways, according to the 72-page complaint. Brave is the only defendant, and the complaint lays out five claims: direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on circumventing access controls, and unjust enrichment under New York law.

The three products named are:

• Ask Brave, the AI answer feature in Brave Search. In the complaint's examples, it returned more than 400 words of one paywalled article verbatim and nearly 700 words of another after a user asked it to retrieve the full text.
• The Brave Search API, sold to developers and AI companies. The Times says a query to its "LLM Context" endpoint returned 1,291 of the 1,295 words in one Times article.
• The Brave Browser, whose "Paywall blocker" setting the complaint says lets users read Times articles without subscribing, and which replaces publishers' ads with Brave's own.

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG), a term the complaint uses throughout, is the practice of fetching documents at query time and feeding them to a language model so it can answer from them.

Which AI companies does the complaint name?

The complaint names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as AI companies that receive Times content through the Brave Search API, describing them as knowingly receiving stolen material. None of them is a defendant in either suit.

To support the claim that the API is used for model training, the Times quotes Brave's own marketing, in which the company lists training and grounding large language models as the API's most common uses. It also quotes a November 2023 Brave blog post saying Anthropic used the API to train Claude 2. Brave's February 2026 blog post says the API handles billions of calls a week, with pricing from $5 per thousand requests.

Perplexity rejected the suit. "The New York Times is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists," Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity's chief communications officer, told The Verge. Brave, Anthropic, Mistral and Cohere did not immediately reply to requests for comment, The Verge reported.

Why can't publishers block Brave's crawler?

The Times says Brave has never disclosed the name of its crawler, so site owners have no way to block it in robots.txt, the file sites use to tell bots what they may fetch. Brave's own crawler help page confirms the setup from the other side: its bot does not identify itself with a distinct user agent and instead skips any page that Googlebot is not allowed to crawl.

By Brave's description, a publisher can keep Brave out only by also shutting out Google's search crawler, which most news sites rely on for traffic. That puts Brave outside the shared robots.txt signal for AI training that OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic agreed to honor on October 30, 2026; Brave was not among the companies that committed to it. The complaint cites the hidden crawler as one reason the infringement is willful.

How did the dispute get here?

The Times says it warned Brave twice before suing. A letter from its intellectual property counsel to Brave CEO Brendan Eich on August 11, 2025 demanded that Brave stop using Times content, and a second letter from outside counsel on April 13, 2026 warned of willful infringement, according to the complaint, which says Brave ignored both.

The Brave suit follows the Times' copyright cases against OpenAI and against Perplexity, the latter filed on December 5, 2025, according to TechCrunch. Perplexity is now named in two Times complaints: once as a defendant and once as a Brave customer.

The complaint puts the stakes in money terms. It says Brave has made more than $100 million from reselling publishers' work, and cites third party reports that Brave's 2025 revenue passed $100 million, up from about $52 million in 2024. Brave has raised roughly $250 million since its founding in 2015, according to private market trackers cited by TechCrunch.

What we don't know yet

• How Brave will respond in court, and whether it will argue fair use or that its index works like any search engine's.
• Whether the Times or the other papers will add any of the named AI companies as defendants.
• How much Times content the AI customers actually received through the API; the complaint gives examples, not totals.
• Whether the two Brave cases will be combined or heard alongside the Times' other AI suits in the same court.