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New York Times Sues Brave Over AI Scraping Claims
The New York Times sued Brave Software on November 2, 2026, alleging copyright infringement and violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The complaint accuses Brave of copying and distributing Times journalism through its search
AI.info Team · Written with AI · fact-checked ·
The New York Times sued Brave Software on November 2, accusing the browser and search company of copyright infringement and violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act through its handling of the newspaper’s journalism. The complaint casts Brave as more than a web index: it says the company copied and distributed Times content to users and made it available to artificial intelligence companies. The allegations place Brave’s search products and data services inside a dispute increasingly focused on how news publishers’ work reaches AI systems. The claims have not been proven in court.
The Times targets Brave’s role in distributing articles
The Times alleges that Brave played a “central role” in copying and distributing its content, including to Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere, according to MLex’s account of the complaint. The newspaper describes Brave as both a copier of publishers’ work and a seller of access to it. “Brave acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI ‘fence’ that sells stolen content to third parties,” the complaint says. The characterization is the Times’ allegation, not a finding by a court.
The complaint brings copyright and DMCA claims, according to MLex. The DMCA claim adds a dispute over alleged circumvention of technical protections to the underlying question of whether Brave copied or distributed protected material without permission. The available account does not establish that the named AI companies themselves are defendants in the Times’ case; it identifies them as recipients of content Brave allegedly made available.
Three other newspapers file a separate case
On the same day, the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed a separate lawsuit against Brave in federal court in Manhattan, The Next Web reported. Both cases focus on Brave’s search index and the data it supplies to AI developers, but the complaints are distinct and their allegations should not be treated as interchangeable. The Times’ claims are described by MLex as copyright infringement and DMCA claims; the other publishers’ complaint includes additional causes of action.
The parallel filing puts Brave’s commercial search services at the center of the dispute. The publishers’ broader concern is that a search index can provide access to journalism in ways that serve AI tools while reducing the need for users to visit the original news sites. The other newspapers also challenge Brave’s AI search answers and a browser feature called Paywall blocker, according to The Next Web. Those details concern the separate case, rather than establishing allegations in the Times’ complaint.
A fight over the route from news sites to AI
Brave Search is the bridge at issue: publishers say material gathered into its index is then made available to AI businesses. For news organizations, the question is not only whether an AI model was trained on an article, but also whether an intermediary copied, packaged or supplied that article to customers. The Times’ case therefore targets the distribution channel as well as the underlying use of its reporting.
The new suit adds to the Times’ existing copyright litigation against AI companies, including its separate cases involving OpenAI and Microsoft, The Next Web reported. It also arrives alongside a separate dispute involving Brave and three newspaper publishers, but the November 2 filings do not resolve whether the challenged indexing and access practices violate copyright or the DMCA. The court will have to assess the claims and Brave’s response before those allegations can be treated as established facts.