As of about 6:35 PM IST (13:05 GMT), Tuesday 3 November 2026. Figures are attributed to the sources that published them; anything not independently confirmed is flagged.
The New York Times sued Brave Software, maker of the privacy-focused Brave browser, on Monday 2 November. The suit accuses the company of scraping the paper's journalism, reusing it in its own AI answers and selling access to it to AI companies. Separately the same day, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar suit. Both cases were filed in federal court in Manhattan.
What the lawsuits allege
- Scraping: Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages using a crawler publishers could not identify or block, according to the Times complaint as reported by TechCrunch.
- Selling access: Brave sells paid access to "real-time online content from the Brave Index" to AI companies, the suits say. The companies named include Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere, which allegedly use it for training, for answering user queries, or both.
- Paywalls and ads: the suits also target a "Paywall blocker" browser feature that Brave promotes as working with "hundreds of top publishers", and Brave's practice of blocking publishers' ads while selling its own.
- Ignored warnings: the Times says Brave "ignored repeated requests" to stop. According to PPC Land and TheWrap, the complaint cites cease-and-desist letters sent in August 2025 and April 2026.
The Times called Brave "a supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" and "an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content to third parties". It is seeking an injunction and damages. These are allegations and have not been tested in court.
What the parties say
- A Times spokesperson told The Verge that Brave "has flouted established copyright law" and that the suit aims to hold it accountable "for stealing our content".
- Steven Lieberman, the lawyer for the other three papers, said: "Buying stolen goods secondhand doesn't make them legitimate."
- Brave had not publicly responded at the time of writing. Brave, Anthropic, Mistral and Cohere did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Verge.
- A Perplexity spokesperson dismissed the suit, telling The Verge the Times "is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists".
Why it matters
Most publisher lawsuits over AI have targeted model makers directly; the Times is already suing OpenAI and Perplexity. This case goes after a company accused of supplying web data to AI firms, which could test whether licensing or reselling a search index exposes the middleman to copyright claims. Brave, founded in 2015, has raised about $250 million, according to private-market trackers cited by TechCrunch.
What to watch
- Brave's formal response and any motion to dismiss.
- Whether the AI companies named in the suits change how they source web data.
- Whether more publishers join or bring similar cases.
Related reading on HorizonDesk
- OpenAI stops training frontier models on the live internet
- Anthropic files S-1 for Nasdaq IPO
- YouTube Music adds AI labels as Deezer filters AI music
