New York Times sues Brave over alleged publisher-content use

The Times complaint says Brave copied and distributed material unlawfully acquired from Times websites to Brave users and other generative AI companies.[1] It names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as companies that received content from Brave.[1] The Times says Brave ignored repeated requests to stop the alleged infringement.[4] It is seeking an injunction and damages.[3] The case was filed on November 2, 2026, and brought in federal court in Manhattan.[2][3]

The publishers’ complaint says Brave’s search index contains more than 30 billion webpages.[2] They allege that Brave did not identify its crawler or provide website owners a way to block it.[2] They also allege AI companies pay Brave for real-time online content from the index, using it to train models or retrieve material for user queries.[2] The complaint says Ask Brave combines indexed online material with an LLM to answer queries, and that its answers often contain verbatim text and detailed summaries of copyrighted articles.[2]

The publishers allege that a Brave Browser setting, when activated, takes users behind website paywalls and provides paywalled content.[2] They also say Brave News is free and offers personalized news from hundreds of sources in the browser.[2] The publishers allege Brave Browser blocks their paid ads and displays Brave’s own ads instead.[2] They say Brave never asked permission to access or copy their material for users or AI companies, and never compensated them for using, copying and distributing copyrighted content.[2] These are allegations in the publishers’ complaint, not findings described in the evidence.

The Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a separate, similar lawsuit against Brave.[3] Both lawsuits were brought in federal court in Manhattan.[3] The publishers allege Brave made more than $100 million by copying and reselling their work without permission, and accuse it of direct copyright infringement in compiling the Brave Index.[2] Brave did not immediately respond to a request for comment.[3] The Times has also sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims.[3]