The New York Times sued Brave Software on Monday, Nov. 2, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging the company scraped its copyrighted content and supplied it to AI companies. The complaint (Case 1:26-cv-09549) calls Brave “the supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content” for its own users and for AI companies it names as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. The complaint names only Brave as a defendant. Everything described here is an allegation.
The Times alleges Brave built an index of more than 30 billion webpages with a crawler it has never named, so site owners could not block it. It also alleges that Brave’s Ask Brave feature outputs summaries and verbatim language from Times articles, that a “Paywall blocker” setting lets browser users get past paywalls, and that Brave blocks publishers’ ads while showing its own. The complaint says The Times sent letters to Brave CEO Brendan Eich on Aug. 11, 2025, and April 13, 2026, and that Brave ignored both.
The Times brings five counts: direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, circumvention of technical measures under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and unjust enrichment under New York law. It seeks statutory and actual damages, restitution of profits, a permanent injunction and a jury trial. The complaint cites third-party reports that Brave’s 2025 revenue passed $100 million.
Separately on Monday, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar suit, also in federal court in Manhattan, TechCrunch reported. The Next Web, which said it reviewed that complaint, reported five claims matching the Times counts. It said the papers seek statutory and actual damages, repayment of profits and a permanent injunction. The Verge quoted the complaint as saying Brave has provided “stolen copyrighted content” to “many” AI companies, including the same five. AI Tech Daily did not obtain that complaint.
“Brave has flouted established copyright law and ignored repeated requests by The Times to stop its infringing conduct,” Times spokesperson Graham James told The Verge. Steven Lieberman, who signed the Times complaint and whom The Verge identifies as the attorney for the three papers, said Brave “must be held responsible for laundering pirated reporting for the AI industry.”
Brave did not immediately respond to requests for comment from TechCrunch and The Verge, which said Anthropic, Mistral and Cohere also did not immediately reply. Perplexity chief communications officer Jesse Dwyer told The Verge that The Times “is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists.” Bloomberg Law also reported the Times suit.
Related: Microsoft and OpenAI unsealed filings quote AI scraping as labor theft and OpenAI and Google announce plans to support a shared robots.txt signal.
Sources
- The New York Times Co. v. Brave Software, Inc., Case 1:26-cv-09549 (S.D.N.Y.), Complaint, filed November 2, 2026 (primary; 72 pages, read in full text)
- The Verge (Jay Peters): The New York Times sues Brave web browser for AI scraping and bypassing paywalls (November 2, 2026; read in full)
- TechCrunch (Rebecca Bellan): New York Times and other outlets sue web browser Brave over alleged content scraping (November 2, 2026; read in full)
- The Next Web: New York Times and three other US papers sue Brave over AI scraping (November 2, 2026; read in full; says it reviewed the Daily News group complaint)
- The Press Democrat via the New York Daily News (Molly Crane-Newman): Tech company Brave plundered newspapers’ content and resold it to AI giants (November 2, 2026; read in full)
- Bloomberg Law (Nino Paoli): New York Times, Daily News Sue Over AI Scraping, Selling Content (November 2, 2026; paywalled, only the visible opening paragraphs read, no bypass)
- AI Tech Daily: Microsoft and OpenAI unsealed filings quote AI scraping as labor theft
- AI Tech Daily: OpenAI and Google announce plans to support a shared robots.txt signal for AI training preferences