New York Times Sues Brave Over Scraped Articles for AI Firms[1]
The Times has also sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims and is seeking an injunction and damages.[4][7]
The New York Times sued Brave on Monday in federal court in Manhattan, alleging it scraped the paper's copyrighted content and distributed it unlawfully to Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.[1][3]
The Times likens Brave to a supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content.[4] The Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel filed a similar lawsuit on Monday saying Brave monetized a scraped index in part by giving AI companies paid access to real-time Brave Index content used to train models, answer queries, or both.[2][9]
The Times suit says Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages using an unidentified crawler, leaving publishers unable to block it.[5] It also targets a browser feature that bypasses paywalls and Brave's practice of blocking publishers' ads while selling its own.[6] The other complaint alleges Brave provided stolen copyrighted content to many AI companies and promotes hundreds of top publishers as accessible through its Paywall blocker, never asked permission, and never compensated them.[10][11]
NYT spokesperson Graham James told The Verge the paper sued to hold Brave accountable for taking Times content for Brave's own products and for prominent generative AI companies.[12] TechCrunch reported Brave did not immediately respond to a request for comment.[8]
If you get news from a chatbot, watch this case for whether paywalled reporting stays in the answers you see.
HOW WE CHECKED IT
Every fact above is a numbered claim below. Each claim carries the exact words from the source that prove it; plain code checked that those words are really on the page. Then DeepSeek (deepseek/deepseek-v4.1-flash-1017) and ChatGPT (openai/gpt-6-luna) voted on every claim without seeing each other's votes or the reporter's evidence, and a copy desk checked that every line says no more than its claims. No lab checks its own news. Claims marked FROM [OUTLET] come from that outlet's or analyst's reporting or testing. The Council checked that the source says it.
"alleging it scraped the outlet’s copyrighted content and unlawfully distributed it to customers the suit names as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere." SOURCE ↗
"Separately on Monday, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar lawsuit." SOURCE ↗
"Both were brought in federal court in Manhattan." SOURCE ↗
"The New York Times, which has also sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims, likens Brave to a “supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content”" SOURCE ↗
"Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages using an unidentified crawler, leaving publishers unable to block it." SOURCE ↗
"The suit also targets a Brave browser feature that bypasses paywalls and the company’s practice of blocking publishers’ ads while selling its own." SOURCE ↗
"The Times seeks an injunction and damages." SOURCE ↗
"Brave did not immediately respond to a request for comment." SOURCE ↗
"providing AI companies with paid access to “real-time online content from the Brave Index.”" SOURCE ↗
"Brave has allegedly provided “stolen copyrighted content” to “many” AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere." SOURCE ↗
"Brave has never asked for the Publishers’ permission to access their websites, much less to copy the material and provide it to users or other AI companies" SOURCE ↗
"We filed this lawsuit to hold Brave accountable for stealing our content to power its own products" SOURCE ↗
The reporter filed 2 more claims that were cut by the check or left out of the final copy, so they aren't published.
SOURCES
PUBLISHED NOV 2, 2026, 12:51 PM ET · ARCHIVED NOV 3, 2026, 11:40 AM ET · SHA-256 483acfea6b1f
PUBLISHED NOV 2, 2026, 2:19 PM ET · ARCHIVED NOV 3, 2026, 12:09 AM ET · SHA-256 b1fbf3bf8f83
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