The New York Times Company on Monday, November 2, 2026, sued Brave Software, the company behind the privacy-focused Brave browser and Brave Search, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The complaint, case 1:26-cv-09549, accuses Brave of copying the newspaper's journalism without permission and distributing it both to its own users and to generative AI companies, and of offering tools built to get around the Times's paywall. The same day, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar lawsuit against Brave in the same court.
At the center of the case is what the Times calls the Brave Index. According to the complaint, Brave built its own search engine by scraping the web into an index that Brave itself describes as covering more than 30 billion pages, without ever disclosing the name of its crawler. The Times argues that this left publishers with no way to identify or block the bot. The filing says that by 2023, with its search business making little headway, Brave began monetizing the index in new ways.
The first, the complaint says, is Ask Brave, an AI feature that answers queries by passing pages from the index to a large language model through retrieval-augmented generation, a capability Brave markets as AI Grounding. The Times alleges the answers often reproduce verbatim text from, or detailed summaries of, its articles. The second is the Brave Search API, which the complaint describes as an illicit source of unlicensed content for other AI companies that pay for real-time access to the index to train models, to answer user queries, or both. The filing points to API products that Brave promotes, including a News index and an LLM Context endpoint that returns extracted page chunks ready for a model.
The suit names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as customers that received the material, citing Brave's own marketing, but they are not defendants. It also quotes a 2023 Brave blog post saying Anthropic used the Search API to train Claude 2. The Times further targets the Brave browser's Paywall blocker setting, which Brave promotes as a way to bypass paywalls, its Brave News feed and its practice of stripping publishers' ads while showing its own.
The complaint brings five counts: direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement; violations of the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; and unjust enrichment under New York law. The Times asks for statutory and actual damages, restitution of profits, a permanent injunction and legal fees, and demands a jury trial. It likens Brave to a burglar and to an AI fence that sells stolen content to third parties.
Times spokesperson Graham James told The Verge that Brave had ignored repeated requests to stop and that the paper sued to hold it accountable for using Times content in its own products and supplying it to well-resourced AI companies. Steven Lieberman, the lawyer who filed the other publishers' case and who also signed the Times complaint, said Brave was selling AI firms a back door to journalism. Brave had not commented when TechCrunch and The Verge published. Perplexity's chief communications officer, Jesse Dwyer, dismissed the suit, telling The Verge the Times was overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists.
The case opens a new front in publishers' legal campaign over AI. The Times is already suing OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims, according to TechCrunch, but this suit goes after an intermediary that supplies search data to many AI developers rather than a model maker. TechCrunch notes that Brave, founded in 2015, has raised roughly $250 million according to private-market trackers. The allegations have not been tested in court.