New York Times Sues Brave Over AI Scraping and Paywalls

The New York Times sues Brave Software in a new federal lawsuit, accusing the browser maker of copying its journalism into a search index used for AI answers, selling access to AI companies and offering a feature that lets users bypass paywalls. The complaint was filed on November 2 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, The Verge reported.

A separate suit making similar claims was filed the same day by the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel. Brave did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

What the lawsuit alleges

The Times says Brave crawled and copied websites without identifying its crawler, building an index of more than 30 billion pages. The complaint makes several main claims:

• Ask Brave: the AI answer feature passes indexed content to a large language model and often returns verbatim text or detailed summaries of articles.
• Brave Search API: Brave allegedly sells access to the same index to AI companies, which use it to train models or answer user questions.
• Paywall blocker: a browser setting that the Times says lets users get around its paywall.
• Ad replacement: built-in ad blocking allegedly removes publishers' ads and shows Brave's own ads.

The Times complaint names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere among the AI companies said to have used Brave's index. Those companies were not sued in these cases.

Letters went unanswered, the Times says

The Times says it wrote to Brave on August 11, 2025, and again on April 13, 2026, and received no answer. It is seeking statutory or actual damages and an injunction, with five counts covering direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, circumvention of technical protections under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and unjust enrichment under New York law.

Times spokesperson Graham James confirmed the filing in a statement to The Verge. In the separate suit, Steven Lieberman, an attorney for the Daily News, Tribune and Sentinel, said: "Buying stolen goods secondhand doesn't make them legitimate." Perplexity spokesperson Jesse Dwyer dismissed the legal action in a statement.

Why it matters

The case tests whether a browser that builds its own web index can be held responsible when that index feeds AI tools. Its outcome could affect how search engines and AI companies license news, and how publishers, including smaller sites, protect their work. None of the claims has been tested in court yet.

More AI coverage: ChatGPT merges its chat and work tabs, the Apple and Google Gemini AI deal and our guide to privacy-focused VPNs.

Photo: The New York Times Building, by Jdforrester / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.