The New York Times is suing Brave for selling its articles to AI companies

The New York Times has sued Brave Software, the company behind the Brave browser, accusing it of scraping Times journalism without permission and selling access to it to some of the biggest names in AI. The complaint, filed in federal court in Manhattan on Monday, calls Brave "the supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" for its own users and for AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere.

Hours later the publishers of the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a near-identical suit in the same court. Both complaints say Brave acts "like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content to third parties." The AI companies are not defendants.

How Brave allegedly sells the news to AI companies

The case centres on the Brave Index, the collection of more than 30 billion web pages behind Brave Search. The Times says Brave built it by crawling the web with a bot it has never named, so site owners had no way to block it, a gap that robots.txt rules alone can't close.

By 2023, the complaint says, Brave had "made little headway" in search and began selling the index in two ways. One is Ask Brave, the AI answer feature in Brave Search, which the Times says often returns verbatim text and detailed summaries of its articles. The other is the Brave Search API, which companies pay for to feed real-time web content to their own models for training or for grounding answers. The complaint quotes Brave's own marketing saying the most common uses are "training and grounding several of the Web's biggest large language models," and cites a 2023 Brave blog post saying Anthropic used the API to train Claude 2.

Asked only for the web address of a paywalled Times article, Ask Brave summarised it, offered to "pull up the full article" and then printed more than 400 words of it word for word. A query to the API's "LLM Context" service returned 1,291 of the 1,295 words in a Times story about a park full of robots.

The paywall blocker and the ads

The suits also target the Brave browser, which has a setting called "Paywall blocker", which Brave describes as letting users "Bypass Paywalls." The complaint quotes a Reddit user who switched the setting on and found they could "read the NYT without interruption and without needing to set up an account." The Times also objects to Brave stripping its ads from its pages while showing Brave's own. Brave has made more than $100 million from publishers' work, the complaint says, while "publishers have received nothing."

The complaint says the Times wrote to Brave's chief executive, Brendan Eich, in August 2025 and again in April 2026 demanding that it stop, and that Brave ignored both letters. Graham James, a Times spokesperson, said in a statement to The Verge that Brave "has flouted established copyright law and ignored repeated requests by The Times to stop its infringing conduct."

"Buying stolen goods secondhand doesn't make them legitimate"

Steven Lieberman, the lawyer for the Daily News and Tribune publishers, said in a statement:

AI giants are now desperate to avoid getting caught red-handed stealing news from publishers, so Brave Software is selling them a back door to the journalism they know they have no right to. Buying stolen goods secondhand doesn't make them legitimate.

Steven Lieberman, lawyer for MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing

Both complaints claim copyright infringement, breaches of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on getting round access controls and unjust enrichment. The Times wants damages, Brave's profits, a permanent injunction and a jury trial.

Brave hasn't commented. Perplexity, which the Times sued separately last year, hit back. "The New York Times is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists," Jesse Dwyer, its chief communications officer, told The Verge.

A new front for the Times

The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 and Perplexity in December 2025, and it is one of a long queue of publishers suing OpenAI. The Brave suit is different: it targets a middleman that supplies several AI labs at once. Brave is already fighting News Corp, which countersued in July over Wall Street Journal and New York Post articles after Brave asked a California court to rule that its indexing was fair use. Publishers keep pushing regardless: in October Canada's biggest papers sued Anthropic, even as a judge threw out the AI Overviews suits against Google.

Why it matters

Many AI companies buy web search results instead of crawling the web themselves. If the Times can show that a supplier is liable for what it sells, every lab that relies on one, including those named here, has a new legal risk to price in.

Sources: The New York Times Company v. Brave Software, complaint, 26-cv-9549 (S.D.N.Y.); Daily News, LP et al. v. Brave Software, complaint, 26-cv-9554 (S.D.N.Y.); The Verge (Times and Perplexity statements); The Next Web (Lieberman statement); News Corp counterclaims, Brave Software v. News Corp.