NYT Sues Brave Over AI Scraping of Its Content

What happened

Both cases target the same infrastructure: Brave's search index and its retrieval service for AI companies. The New York Times sued Brave Software in federal court in Manhattan on Nov 2, alleging it copied copyrighted content without permission and sold access to AI companies; the same day, the publishers of the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a separate, similar suit.

The complaints say Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages with a crawler whose name it has not disclosed, leaving site operators unable to block it by name, and then sold AI companies real-time online content through the Brave Search API for training models or answering user queries. The named customers — Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere — are not defendants in these suits.

Both suits also target a browser setting called Paywall blocker, alleged to let users read subscription content without logging in, and the Ask Brave AI answer feature, alleged to reproduce verbatim passages or detailed summaries. The Times says it wrote twice to Brave CEO Brendan Eich, in August 2025 and April 2026, demanding the conduct stop, and received no response.

Key facts

1. Two suits: both filed Nov 2, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York; the Times sued alone, while three Alden papers sued together
2. Index scale: Brave's index holds more than 30 billion web pages, growing by millions daily; the crawler's name is undisclosed, so sites cannot block it by name
3. Named customers: Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere, which obtain real-time content via the Brave Search API; none is a defendant
4. Disputed features: Ask Brave AI answers and the browser's Paywall blocker setting, alleged to output verbatim text or detailed summaries and to bypass subscription logins respectively
5. Claims: five counts — direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, DMCA anti-circumvention, and unjust enrichment
6. Relief and responses: both suits seek injunctions and damages; Perplexity dismissed the suit, while Brave, Anthropic, Mistral, xAI and Cohere did not immediately respond to requests for comment
7. Background: the Times has previously sued OpenAI and Perplexity on similar claims; Brave sued News Corp in March 2025 seeking a ruling that its indexing is fair use