New York Times and Major Publishers File Lawsuit Against Brave Software

The New York Times, alongside the publishers of the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel, has initiated legal action against Brave Software in Manhattan federal court. The lawsuits, filed on November 2, 2026, accuse the browser company of systematically scraping copyrighted journalism to build a massive index of over 30 billion web pages. According to the complaints, Brave then allegedly sold access to this data to various AI developers, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.

The plaintiffs characterize Brave’s business practices as both a misappropriation of intellectual property and a form of digital fencing. The legal filings argue that Brave acts as a supplier and distributor of stolen content, enabling third-party AI companies to utilize protected articles for training large language models and powering retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. The newspapers claim that Brave ignored repeated requests to cease these activities, prompting the current litigation.

Beyond the allegations regarding AI training data, the lawsuits target specific features within the Brave browser. The publishers contend that the company’s tools allow users to bypass paywalls, granting unauthorized access to subscription-based journalism. Furthermore, the complaints allege that Brave’s AI-powered search feature, "Ask Brave," reproduces articles nearly verbatim, effectively serving as a substitute for the original reporting rather than directing traffic to the publishers' websites.

The legal action includes five primary claims: direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement, violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) regarding the circumvention of access controls, and unjust enrichment. While the lawsuits name several prominent AI firms as recipients of the scraped data, these companies are not listed as defendants. The New York Times and the other plaintiffs are seeking injunctive relief and monetary damages to address the alleged infringement of their intellectual property.