The New York Times sued Brave Software on Monday in federal court in Manhattan, alleging the browser company scraped its journalism into a web index of more than 30 billion pages and sold access to that index to AI developers. Hours later, the publishers of the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a separate suit in the same court making similar claims.
Both complaints name five AI companies as customers of Brave's Search API: Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. The publishers point to Brave's own marketing, which describes the API's most common uses as "in training and grounding several of the Web's biggest large language models." The filings also cite a Brave blog post that reportedly says Anthropic used the API to train Claude 2.
The Brave Index powers Brave Search. According to the publishers, Brave has never disclosed the name of the crawler that builds it, which they say leaves sites unable to block it.
Key facts
- 01The New York Times sued Brave Software on November 2, 2026, in federal court in Manhattan.
- 02The Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed a separate suit against Brave the same day.
- 03Both complaints name Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as customers of Brave's Search API.
- 04The publishers say Brave's index covers 30B+ pages and that more than 2 million registered articles are affected.
- 05Brave reported more than $100M in 2025 revenue and about 130M monthly users, according to the complaint.
The lawsuits reach past the index. They target Ask Brave, the company's AI answer feature, which the publishers allege returns article passages word for word and produces detailed summaries of their reporting. They also target a Paywall blocker setting that the newspapers say lets users read subscription content without logging in, along with Brave's practice of blocking publishers' ads by default while selling its own.
The three newspapers, owned by Alden and published by MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, assert five claims: direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement; circumvention of technical protections under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; and unjust enrichment under New York law. The Times filed its own copyright and DMCA claims.
The publishers say more than two million registered articles are affected. They are seeking statutory and actual damages, repayment of Brave's profits and a permanent injunction, and they have asked for a jury trial. The newspapers' complaint describes Brave as acting like "a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content."
Brave did not immediately respond to requests for comment and has not yet answered either complaint in court. The company has staked out its position on indexing before: in March 2025, Brave sued News Corp, asking a court to declare that its web indexing is fair use. News Corp countersued in July, accusing Brave of AI copyright infringement.
According to figures cited in the complaint, Brave reported more than $100 million in revenue in 2025 and has around 130 million monthly users. The company was founded in 2015 and has raised roughly $250 million, according to private-market trackers.
The newspapers also cite a study finding that AI crawlers generate 95.7% less referral traffic than Google search.
Monday's suits add Brave to a list of AI-adjacent companies the same publishers are already fighting in court. The Times and the Alden papers have separately sued OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright, and the Times has also sued Perplexity on similar grounds.
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