Key points
- The Times sued Brave Software in federal court in Manhattan; a second, similar suit came from three other newspapers the same day.
- The complaints allege Brave sells scraped publisher content to AI firms and offers a paywall-bypass feature in its browser.
- The Times says it sent cease-and-desist letters in August 2025 and April 2026, and it seeks an injunction and damages.
- Brave had not responded to requests for comment at the time of reporting.
Why it matters for marketers: Content that powers AI search and answer tools is now a litigation target, so marketers should check how their own content gets crawled, licensed and monetized by third parties.
The New York Times has sued Brave Software, maker of the Brave browser and search engine, alleging it copied the paper's copyrighted articles without permission. A separate but similar complaint was filed the same day by the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel. Both cases were brought in federal court in Manhattan.
According to the complaints, Brave built a large web index and sold access to it, including through a Search API, to AI companies. The suits name Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as customers. TechCrunch reports the Times' filing says the index covers more than 30 billion pages and was built with an unidentified crawler that publishers could not block. The suits also take aim at Brave's paywall-blocking feature and at its practice of replacing publishers' ads with its own.
Brave had not replied to requests for comment. Perplexity's communications chief dismissed the suit in a statement to The Verge, saying the Times was overpaying lawyers and underpaying journalists. The other named AI firms had not responded either. All claims so far are allegations, and none has been tested in court.
For marketers and content teams, the cases extend the fight over AI training into retrieval, where tools pull live content to answer questions. If courts accept the theory that selling index access creates liability, the legal risk may reach the data suppliers behind AI search tools, not only the model makers.
Watch Brave's formal response and any ruling on the injunction request. In the meantime, review your own crawler controls, licensing terms and ad-integrity monitoring, since the complaints suggest unidentified crawlers and ad replacement are problems for publishers of every size.
Sources
This brief is our own summary. Read the full reporting at the source.
