The New York Times Company and three other newspapers on November 2, 2026 filed two federal lawsuits against Brave Software, the San Francisco company behind the Brave browser and Brave Search, accusing it of copying their journalism into a search index it sells to artificial intelligence companies, of reproducing paywalled articles through its own AI answers, and of profiting from advertising it substitutes for theirs.

In Short

The New York Times and three other newspapers, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, sued the company that makes the Brave browser and search engine on November 2, 2026. They say Brave copies their articles into a giant database, then hands the text to its own AI chatbot, to AI companies that pay for access, and to browser users who switch on a setting that gets around paywalls. They want money, including the ad revenue Brave earned while blocking their ads, plus a court order that stops all of it, and Brave has not yet answered in court.

Two complaints, one template

The suits were filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The Times' case is numbered 26-cv-9549. The second, brought by Daily News, LP, Chicago Tribune Company, LLC and Orlando Sentinel Communications Company, LLC, is 26-cv-9554. Both name a single defendant, Brave Software, Inc., both demand a jury trial, and both are dated November 2, 2026 and signed by Steven Lieberman of Rothwell, Figg, Ernst & Manbeck, the Washington firm that represents the plaintiffs in each case.

The two documents share most of their language, including the line that will travel furthest. "Brave acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content to third parties," according to both complaints. "And the third parties are serving as the knowing receivers of that stolen content, which they have used to build their trillion dollar businesses."

Each complaint pleads the same five counts:

  • Direct copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501, covering the copies Brave allegedly made to build its index and the copies it allegedly delivers through Ask Brave, its API and its browser.
  • Contributory copyright infringement, on the theory that Brave induced and supplied infringement by its users and its AI customers.
  • Vicarious copyright infringement, on the theory that Brave controls the products and profits from each API response.
  • Circumvention under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(A) and § 1201(a)(2), aimed at the browser's paywall blocker.
  • Unjust enrichment under New York law, aimed at Brave's practice of blocking publishers' ads and selling its own.

The fifth count is the one advertisers should read most closely, because both complaints state that it "does not depend on any copying, reproduction, or distribution" of the newspapers' content. It is a claim about advertising money, not about copying.

Who is suing, and over how much

The Times says it owns "over 10 million registered, copyrighted works," listed in an exhibit to its complaint. It reports more than 13 million paying subscribers as of June 30, 2026, and between 50 and 100 million users a week. The complaint also covers Wirecutter, the product review site the Times bought in 2016, and The Athletic.

The three Daily News plaintiffs list their registrations by newspaper issue. The Daily News owns "over 9,000 registered, copyrighted newspaper issues," containing more than 500,000 articles. The Chicago Tribune lists more than 15,000 issues and more than 1.2 million articles, the Orlando Sentinel more than 8,500 issues and more than 400,000 articles. Across the three exhibits the complaint counts "over 2 million articles." By PPC Land's own addition, that is more than 32,500 registered issues.

These are not new litigants. The same three papers are among the "Daily News plaintiffs" in the consolidated copyright litigation against OpenAI and Microsoft, where OpenAI, Microsoft and five groups of news plaintiffs moved for summary judgment on September 4, 2026 over more than 10.8 million asserted works. In August, Times chief executive Meredith Kopit Levien said the company had sued three AI companies: OpenAI, Microsoft and Perplexity. The Times and the Chicago Tribune each filed suit against Perplexity in December 2025, cases PPC Land noted when CNN sued Perplexity over more than 17,000 works in May 2026. Brave was not among them.

What Brave sells, according to the complaints

The complaints describe three products built on one asset, which they call the Brave Index. According to Brave's own AI page, cited in both filings, the index includes "over 30 billion webpages, with millions of new pages indexed each day." PPC Land reported a larger figure, more than 35 billion pages, in its July coverage of Brave's $5 per 1,000 request Search API. The two numbers are not in conflict, since "over 30 billion" covers both.

The complaints tell the story as a pivot. Brave first built an independent search engine, compiling its index through web scraping of billions of pages. "But by 2023, Brave had made little headway in the search business," according to both complaints. "So instead, Brave adopted a new business model: it decided to monetize its index of scraped web pages."

Ask Brave

The first product is Ask Brave. Brave launched an AI feature called Summarizer in Brave Search in 2023, according to the complaints, then updated and renamed it in 2025. PPC Land covered the change when Brave announced Ask Brave on September 29, 2025 as a single interface for search and AI chat. Ask Brave feeds pages from the index to a large language model through retrieval augmented generation, the process in which a system retrieves documents relevant to a prompt, adds them to the prompt and asks the model to answer from them. Brave calls this AI Grounding. According to the complaints, Brave Search answers more than 50 million queries a day, "and a third of those queries lead to an AI generated response."

The Brave API

The second is the Brave Search API, which the complaints describe as "an illicit source of unlicensed copyrighted material." They quote a Brave guide from September 22, 2023 that sets out what the product is for: "The most common uses today are in training and grounding several of the Web's biggest large language models (LLM), in addition to powering popular AI apps. This is likely to continue to be the primary use case for the Brave Search API."

The complaints single out four endpoints. News Search is described by Brave as "a specialized index of articles sourced from trusted outlets worldwide," with "up to 5 additional excerpts per search result." Web Search returns results from the full index, also with "5 additional excerpts per search result," which Brave presents as useful for "[c]omprehensive content preview before clicking through." LLM Context "returns extracted page chunks and source metadata in a shape and length that satisfies the needs of an LLM without need for further scraping," and offers "actual page content (text, tables, code) ready for LLM consumption - no scraping needed." Answers returns model-generated responses grounded in the index; according to the complaints, it is "the same service that powers the Ask Brave product."

Who buys it? Both complaints name Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere in their first paragraph. Brave's own pages, as quoted, say the API is "[u]sed by some of the biggest names in AI, including Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity, and You.com" and serves "most of the top 10 AI LLMs with real-time Web search data." A Brave blog post from November 2, 2023, announcing the desktop launch of its Leo assistant, stated that "Anthropic used Brave's Search API to train their latest model, Claude 2, on high-quality data to help optimize Claude's outputs for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) queries." The complaints also cite Meta's July 2024 Llama 3 paper, which describes training the model to use Brave's API "to answer questions about recent events that go beyond its knowledge cutoff or that require retrieving a particular piece of information from the web." According to a Brave blog post dated February 24, 2026, the API handles billions of API calls weekly.

None of these AI companies is a defendant.

The Brave Browser

The third product is the browser, which according to the complaints delivers paywalled articles without a subscription, strips publishers' advertising and carries Brave News, a free feed Brave describes as "Private, personalized news. From hundreds of sources. Right in your browser." The Times says Brave lists it among those sources using its registered trademark without authorization. The Daily News complaint shows the Chicago Tribune in the same list. Neither complaint pleads a trademark claim.

The browser also contains Leo, Brave's built-in assistant, which the complaints say can "summarize a webpage" and "create content like articles." Leo is described in both filings, but neither presents an example of Leo output.

The tests: what Ask Brave returned

Most of each complaint is evidence: conversations with Ask Brave and queries to the API, set beside the original articles with the overlapping text highlighted. The plaintiffs wrote the prompts, and several of them ask Ask Brave to offer the full text of an article before it does so. The results, as the complaints describe them, are still striking.

In the Times complaint, Ask Brave was given only the address of a paywalled Times article. It produced a summary, then asked whether the user would like it to "pull up the full article." Told "yes please," it "output over 400 words from The Times's article, verbatim." Asked for "the most reputable newspaper's most prominent article today," Ask Brave named a Times story titled "Inside Elon Musk's $276 Million Midterm Rescue Mission for Republicans," answered "Here's the full article" when prompted, and produced nearly 700 words of it.

The most pointed example concerns a story about President Trump. Before delivering it, Ask Brave warned that "some of the outlets like the NYT and WaPo may be paywalled; I'll do my best to retrieve the full text from what's publicly accessible." It then provided "approximately 87%" of the article, according to the complaint, and closed by saying the rest was "behind the NYT paywall." The Times calls that caveat "disingenuous, given that it immediately followed Brave's verbatim reproduction of nearly the entire paywalled article."

Two Times examples go beyond news. Asked "I want reviews of menorahs," Ask Brave returned Wirecutter's top picks from its article "The Best Modern Menorahs," with paraphrased or verbatim text, but linked to retailers selling the products rather than to Wirecutter, "thereby depriving Wirecutter of potential revenue from affiliate referrals." It linked to Wirecutter only when asked for "all the details of the article [Ask Brave] cited the most." A separate exchange produced "the full detail" of an Athletic article explaining the NFL's emergency third quarterback rule.

The Daily News complaint follows the same pattern, newspaper by newspaper. Asked to "Show me the articles Today in the New York Daily News" and then offer to pull up "the full complete version" of any of them, Ask Brave listed the titles of 35 Daily News articles published that day and replied: "would you like me to pull up the full text of any of these articles? If so, just tell me which one(s) and I'll fetch the complete version." It then reproduced an article about a guard arrested for taking bribes, and nearly 600 words of another headlined "NYC to ban Central Park horse carriages under deal between Mamdani, Menin."

The Chicago Tribune examples are longer. Ask Brave produced more than 1,200 words of "Data centers near O'Hare win nearly $100M in local tax breaks, leaving suburban homeowners to cover the gap," and more than 1,000 words of a Tribune report on an alleged sexual assault near the University of Chicago. For the Orlando Sentinel, a general question, "What's going on in Orlando politics," led to verbatim and closely paraphrased text from an article on the Florida governor's race between Donalds and Jolly.

The tests: what the API returned

The API examples show how much text a paying customer receives from a single query. The plaintiffs typed the headline of one of their articles into an endpoint and compared the output with the original.

Plaintiff Article Endpoint Text returned, per the complaint
New York Times "Poland Objects to Holocaust-Era Map in Netflix Series" LLM Context Nearly half of the article
New York Times Same article Web Search Over a third
New York Times Same article News Search Over a third, verbatim
New York Times "Mixed Human Feelings After a Day at a Park Full of Robots" LLM Context 1,291 of 1,295 words, verbatim
Orlando Sentinel "Florida Amendment 3 threatens votes on local school taxes, districts say" LLM Context The entire article
Orlando Sentinel Same article News Search 250 words
Daily News "Amid on-the-job deaths, Taxi Workers Alliance calls on state to fund driver health benefits" News Search Nearly 350 words, verbatim
Chicago Tribune "To spur housing growth, Chicago must attack prerogative, outdated zoning: report" News Search More than 250 words, verbatim

The Daily News complaint adds further LLM Context examples for the Daily News and the Tribune, saying in each case that the API "provided the user, verbatim, a substantial portion of the text from the article."

That evidence matters because of how the claims are built. These are retrieval claims. The text comes from pages fetched and stored in the index, then handed over at the moment of the query. In the OpenAI case, where training is a central issue, an expert for OpenAI found 24 instances of verbatim regurgitation across 20 million chat logs. The Brave complaints do not depend on a model having memorised anything. They argue that the product's purpose is to return the page. When Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sued Perplexity in September 2025 over its retrieval system, PPC Land noted that the US Copyright Office's May 2025 report had found such systems less likely to be transformative when they generate summaries or abridged versions.

The paywall blocker and the DMCA claim

The circumvention count rests on a single browser setting. According to the complaints, the Brave Browser includes "a default setting that, when activated, causes the browser to go behind website paywalls and provide the paywalled content to the user." It is called Paywall blocker. In the settings view reproduced in the Times complaint, it sits among dozens of optional filter lists in Brave's Shields settings, between a chat app blocker and a pornography blocker, with the subtitle "Bypass Paywalls Clean Filters." The complaints do not say whether it is switched on for new installations.

Both complaints quote a Reddit post from April 28, 2026: "Today I scrolled down a bit and noticed a Paywall Blocker filter. I switched it on, headed over to the New York Times, and OOH LA LA the paywall had gone." They cite a May 2023 thread on Brave's community forum titled "Add paywall buypass into brave," in which a user the complaints identify as a Brave employee replied: "Good as an extension, but not for everyone. We do have anti-paywall solution in brave://adblock." And they describe a post on X in which a Brave employee explained how to get around Times paywalls, tagging several colleagues including Luke Mulks, Brave's vice president of business operations, while another employee suggested users "just enable the paywall list in Brave filters" to "remove the nag." Brave staff, according to the Times, refer to its registration and subscription prompts as "paywall nag."

Each complaint then shows the same article opened in another browser, where the paywall appears, and in Brave, where the text is displayed "without a login." The Times shows this for its own site. The Daily News complaint repeats it three times, once for each paper.

The legal theory has two parts. Under § 1201(a)(1)(A), "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work." Under § 1201(a)(2), no one may traffic in a product that is "primarily designed" for circumvention, has "only limited commercially significant purpose" otherwise, or is "marketed" for that use. The complaints say the paywall bypass feature meets all three tests. They also say each act of circumvention is a separate violation, and they seek the remedies in § 1203, including statutory damages and "the destruction of any device involved in the violation."

Two things will shape that fight. The first is the word "effectively." The complaints say the plaintiffs' measures "require the application of information, processes, and authorized interactions in order to access the works in usable form" and "prevent unlicensed access to the underlying files, not just reproduction of content." They do not describe how the filter list gets past those measures. That gap has a history. When PPC Land reported on Common Crawl's archive of paywalled articles in November 2025, the explanation was that its scraper never executes the subscription-check code some publishers run in the browser, and so captured complete articles.

The second is that anti-circumvention claims against automated access have had mixed results. Google sued SerpApi under the DMCA on December 19, 2025, alleging evasion of its SearchGuard system and seeking $200 to $2,500 per act. On July 20, 2026, a federal judge in California dismissed Google's original complaint with leave to amend some claims, and Google came back on August 10 with an amended complaint built on Reddit licensing terms. Brave itself had pointed to Google v. SerpApi as an example of the risk faced by API providers that build on scraped results rather than on an index of their own. It now faces a DMCA claim of its own, though one aimed at its browser rather than its index.

The advertising claim

For the advertising market, the most unusual part of both complaints is Count V. It does not allege copying. It alleges that Brave took the plaintiffs' advertising positions.

"Brave has unfairly, improperly, and unjustly reaped a financial benefit from its use of Times Content in the form of the revenue it receives by blocking the advertising that accompanies Times Content and showing advertising of its own," the Times complaint states. "Brave's revenue came from displacing advertisements from which The Times would have derived revenue, and from exploiting a readership that The Times built at its own cost. The money Brave collected corresponds to revenue The Times lost." The claim "rests entirely on Brave's displacement of, and profiting from, its usurpation of The Times's paid advertising positions and the advertising revenue those positions generate." The Daily News complaint uses the same words for all three papers.

The relief sought is "restitution and disgorgement of all revenue and profits Brave obtained through its ad-substitution scheme, plus interest."

The factual base is Brave's own marketing. Both complaints quote Brave's statement that its browser "blocks ads by default, making the Web faster, safer, and less cluttered for people all over the world." Both quote Brave's pitch to advertisers: "Advertise on the Brave browser and search engine" and "[r]each and convert millions of Brave users with effective ad placements catered to all marketing objectives." Both quote the Brave Rewards offer: "Support content creators and earn tokens for ads you see in Brave. Use your tokens in Web3 apps, to book flights, exchange for other currencies, and more."

The Times' side-by-side comparison shows one of its article pages in Google Chrome and in Brave. In Chrome, a banner invites readers to subscribe for "$1/week for your first six months." In Brave, it is gone. The Daily News complaint shows Chicago Tribune ads removed in the same way. In both comparisons the space is simply empty; neither complaint shows a Brave ad appearing on a Times or Tribune page.

That model has been public for years. PPC Land reported in November 2019 that Brave was launching an ad network while blocking publishers' ads, with 70% of revenue shared with users who opted in to Brave Rewards. In March 2026, PPC Land's analysis of how Brave blocks other companies' ads and sells its own recorded growth from 80 million monthly active users in January 2025 to 109 million in February 2026, a 70% user revenue share, and Brave Search Ads leaving beta on May 30, 2024. In June 2026, Brave released Brave Origin, a paid version that removes Rewards and with it browser-based Brave Ads, for $59.99.

What the complaints do not do is define the scope. Brave sells several formats, including ads in the browser and ads on Brave Search results pages, and the filings treat them under a single label, "Brave Ads." They do not say which revenue counts as "ad-substitution," how much of it is tied to Times or Tribune readers, or how a court would measure it. The Times has a figure for what is at stake on its side. Its digital advertising revenue rose 20.7% to $114.0 million in the second quarter of 2026.

Ad blocking has been fought in court before. In August 2025, PPC Land reported that the Federal Court of Justice had revived Axel Springer's lawsuit against Eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus, sending a copyright argument back to the Hamburg court. The unjust enrichment count takes a different route: it does not ask whether blocking is lawful, only who keeps the money.

The complaints also tie Brave's ad business to New York to justify the venue. As of October 30, 2026, according to both filings, Brave's transparency page reported 10 active ad campaigns in New York State. The complaints name New York-based staff including Brave's chief financial officer, Bill Engles, its vice president of sales for global Brave Ads, Richard Rosenzweig, and a senior director of advertising sales, Peter Adams II, and they list NYIAX, a New York advertising exchange, as a Brave customer, without saying which Brave product it buys.

The crawler Brave does not name

Both complaints return repeatedly to one allegation about how the index was built. "Brave, however, has never disclosed the name of its 'bot,'" they state, so it crawled and copied "the over 30 billion webpages in the Brave Index without identifying itself or providing website owners with any mechanism to block its crawler." The complaints use this to support willfulness, and they allege that Brave "hides information regarding the bot that it uses to collect information from behind the paywalls so that The Times and other copyright owners cannot target it."

Brave has a published explanation, on the crawler help page the complaints cite. That page says the crawler does not use a distinct user agent because Brave wants to avoid being discriminated against by sites that allow only Google to crawl them, and that Brave's bot will not crawl a domain or page that Googlebot is not allowed to crawl. It tells site owners they can remove a page from Brave's results with a noindex directive. In practice, robots.txt offers no separate instruction for Brave: a publisher that wants Brave's crawler out has to shut out Googlebot too. The complaints say Brave makes it "impossible" for publishers to block its bots.

The dispute lands as publishers press for exactly this kind of disclosure. In September, more than 300 publishing executives asked Congress to pass the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, introduced in July 2026, which would require AI bots to identify themselves. The same PPC Land report noted that New York had passed a Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act in June 2026. Neither complaint invokes the New York law.

Brave's numbers, as the plaintiffs present them

The complaints describe Brave as a company that discloses little. "Because Brave is a private company, it does not have to disclose information regarding its revenues, valuation, or other financial metrics," they state. The figures they use come from a mix of Brave's own pages and what the filings call "third-party reports" and "industry observers":

  • Founded in 2015 by Brendan Eich and Brian Bondy; early investors reported to include Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, Foundation Capital and Propel Venture Partners.
  • Revenue for 2025 reported to have passed $100 million, up from about $52 million in 2024.
  • A valuation of about $980 million.
  • Close to 130 million monthly users and more than 50 million daily users of the browser as of September 30, 2026, citing Brave's transparency page.

PPC Land's own record of Brave's disclosures runs in the same direction. Brave reported 101 million monthly active users on September 30, 2025, and in July 2026 it reported 122.55 million monthly users and 2.46 billion monthly search queries, the same month Brave Search was added to Chrome's global list of default search engines.

One figure needs care. Each complaint states that "Brave has made more than $100 million by copying and reselling publishers' work without consent or permission." The only $100 million number elsewhere in the filings is the third-party estimate of Brave's total revenue for 2025, which covers advertising, search ads, subscriptions and the API alike. The complaints do not break revenue down by product, so the share that comes from selling index access is not established. Brave's API pricing is public: PPC Land reported in July that the Search plan costs $5 per 1,000 requests and the Answers plan $4 per 1,000 web searches plus $5 per million tokens, similar to the rates Brave set when it launched AI Grounding on August 5, 2025.

The filings are not fully consistent on users either. The paragraph on Brave's scale gives close to 130 million monthly users, while a later paragraph, citing industry observers, says "over 100 million."

Where the two suits differ

New York Times v. Brave Daily News et al. v. Brave
Case number 26-cv-9549 26-cv-9554
Plaintiffs The New York Times Company Daily News, LP; Chicago Tribune Company, LLC; Orlando Sentinel Communications Company, LLC
Registered works Over 10 million Over 2 million articles in more than 32,500 issues
Products covered New York Times, Wirecutter, The Athletic Three newspapers and their websites
Prior warnings Letters of August 11, 2025 and April 13, 2026 None described
Willfulness grounds Ignored letters, paywall bypass, undisclosed crawler Paywall bypass, undisclosed crawler
Extra harm alleged Lost Wirecutter affiliate referrals; Times trademark in Brave News Chicago Tribune listed in Brave News
Counts Five, identical in structure Five, identical in structure

The main difference is notice. The Times says it warned Brave twice. On August 11, 2025, its intellectual property counsel, Carl Mazurek, wrote to Brave's chief executive, Brendan Eich, that "Brave's products and services output summaries of, and verbatim language from, The Times's content," and asked Brave to stop all unauthorized access, use and copying. A second letter from outside counsel followed on April 13, 2026, warning that "Brave's failure to respond to the August 2025 Letter and its continuing, egregious infringement demonstrate reckless disregard for The Times's rights and constitute willful infringement, warranting enhanced statutory damages up to $150,000 per infringement." Brave ignored both letters, according to the complaint.

The Daily News complaint describes no letters. Its willfulness allegation rests only on the paywall bypass and Brave's "refusal to release the name of its web crawler bot." That difference could matter, because willfulness raises the ceiling on statutory damages.

What the plaintiffs want

Neither complaint states a dollar figure. Both ask the court for:

  • statutory damages, actual damages and restitution of profits;
  • a permanent injunction against "the unlawful conduct alleged herein";
  • costs, expenses and attorneys' fees;
  • under the DMCA count, the remedies of § 1203, including destruction of devices involved in the violation;
  • under the unjust enrichment count, disgorgement of the revenue and profits from what the complaints call the "ad-substitution scheme," with interest;
  • a jury trial on all claims that can be tried to a jury.

An injunction covering "the unlawful conduct alleged herein" would, read literally, reach the index, Ask Brave, the API endpoints, the paywall blocker and the ad replacement at once. How a court would frame relief if the plaintiffs won is a long way off. Brave has not yet answered either complaint. According to TechBuzz, Brave had not issued a public response on the day the suits were filed.

What the complaints do not establish

Several points are asserted in the filings without evidence in them.

The complaints say the API is used for training, quoting Brave's 2023 guide and its Claude 2 statement. The Meta citation, read on its own terms, describes Llama 3 calling Brave's search to answer questions at the moment they are asked rather than training on the index. The filings do not say which of the named AI companies use the API now, which endpoints they use, or whether any of them received Times or Tribune articles.

The tests show what Ask Brave and the API returned for prompts the plaintiffs wrote. They do not show how often ordinary users ask for full articles, how often the API returns article text for queries that are not a headline, or how many users have switched on the paywall blocker. Nor do the filings say who maintains that filter list, and the revenue figure, as noted above, is not tied to any product.

Why this matters for the marketing community

For advertisers, Count V turns ad blocking with replacement ads into a revenue question in a US court, independent of whether any article was copied. Brave Ads buyers are not parties, but the complaints describe the business they pay into as built on publishers' displaced inventory, and they seek every dollar of it that a court attributes to that displacement.

For publishers, the suits test whether the AI supply chain can be challenged at the wholesale level. Most earlier news publisher suits targeted answer engines and model makers. These target a company that sells search results, page text and grounded answers to those engines, and they argue the buyers are "knowing receivers." If the theory holds, licensing pressure could move upstream to data and search providers.

For search and AI visibility specialists, the cases concern one of the few independent web indexes. PPC Land noted in April 2024 that Brave described Brave Search as having the only independent search index besides Bing and Google. AI answer engines that rely on Brave's API draw their picture of the web, and of which brands and publishers they cite, partly from that index. An injunction affecting the News Search or LLM Context endpoints would change what those systems can retrieve.

And for anyone managing crawler access, the cases put Brave's nameless crawler on trial. The plaintiffs say its design shows intent; Brave's help page says it is about not being shut out by sites that welcome only Google. A New York jury may be asked to choose between those readings.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The New York Times Company, and separately Daily News, LP, Chicago Tribune Company, LLC and Orlando Sentinel Communications Company, LLC, all represented by Rothwell, Figg, Ernst & Manbeck, against Brave Software, Inc., maker of the Brave browser, Brave Search, Ask Brave and the Brave Search API. Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere are named as API customers but are not defendants.

What: Two lawsuits, each with five counts: direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement over Brave's search index, Ask Brave answers and API endpoints; circumvention under the DMCA over the browser's paywall blocker; and unjust enrichment under New York law over Brave blocking the papers' ads and selling its own. The complaints include tests in which the API returned up to 1,291 of 1,295 words of a Times article and Ask Brave reproduced more than 1,200 words of a Chicago Tribune article.

When: Both complaints were filed on November 2, 2026. The Times says it warned Brave in letters dated August 11, 2025 and April 13, 2026.

Where: The US District Court for the Southern District of New York, cases 26-cv-9549 and 26-cv-9554. The plaintiffs point to Brave staff, customers, ad campaigns and an API server in New York to support venue.

Why: The publishers argue that Brave turned an index built by crawling their sites under no disclosed name into a product sold to AI companies and into AI answers that replace visits to their sites, while its browser removes their paywalls and ads. They seek damages, restitution of profits including ad revenue, and a permanent injunction. Brave has not yet responded in court.