The New York Times and three other US newspapers sued Brave Software on November 2, 2026, accusing the privacy-focused browser company of copying their journalism into a giant search index and selling access to AI companies. The papers say Brave’s index covers more than 30 billion web pages, that its API is marketed for training AI models, and that Brave’s browser helps readers get around paywalls. Brave had not publicly responded.
Who is suing, and where?
Two separate suits in federal court in Manhattan. The New York Times filed one. Hours later, the publishers of the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel, all owned by Alden Global Capital, filed another, saying more than two million of their registered articles are affected. They claim copyright infringement, breaking technical protections under the DMCA and, for the Alden papers, unjust enrichment. They want damages, Brave’s profits, a permanent injunction and a jury trial.
What do they say Brave did?
- Built a giant index of 30 billion+ pages with a crawler Brave has not named, so publishers cannot block it.
- Sold it to AI labs: the complaints say Brave’s Search API is sold to Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere, and marketed for training and grounding AI models.
- Copied articles in AI answers: its "Ask Brave" feature allegedly reproduces passages word for word.
- Bypassed paywalls: a browser setting allegedly lets users read subscriber content without logging in.
- Blocked publishers’ ads by default while selling its own.
Why does this case matter more than it looks?
Because Brave is a supplier, not just a chatbot. Most AI copyright suits target the model makers directly, like USA TODAY’s case against OpenAI. This one goes after the company that sells the web data many AI tools use to answer questions in real time. If publishers win, every search API that feeds AI could face the same claims, which would raise costs across the industry.
Brave has fought this before. In March 2025 it sued News Corp, asking a court to declare its web indexing fair use, and News Corp countersued that July. The publishers also cite a study finding AI crawlers send 95.7% less referral traffic than Google Search, the heart of the "no reason to click" argument that now runs through almost every publisher case.
For readers, nothing changes today. For anyone building with AI search APIs, it is worth watching whose data sits underneath your answers.
Read The Next Web’s report.
