New York Times sues San Francisco’s Brave, saying it copies and sells Times articles to AI companies
The suit also targets a Brave browser setting that the Times says gets around its paywall.
The New York Times sued Brave Software, the San Francisco maker of the Brave web browser and Brave Search, on Nov. 2. The Times accuses Brave of copying its articles without permission and selling access to them to artificial intelligence companies, according to the complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan.
Brave built its own search index, a stored copy of more than 30 billion web pages, so its search engine does not depend on Google or Microsoft’s Bing, the suit says. The Times says Brave profits from that copy two ways. Its “Ask Brave” feature hands stored pages to an AI chatbot that writes answers, often using Times text. And its Search API, a paid service that lets other companies’ software query the index, feeds content to AI firms. The complaint names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as customers.
The Times also objects to a browser setting called “Paywall blocker.” It says the setting breaks the digital lock on its subscriptions, which would violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 law.
The Times says Brave ignored cease-and-desist letters sent in August 2025 and April 2026. It wants money damages and a court order stopping the conduct, which could force changes to products used by what the complaint says are about 130 million people a month. Brave had not responded publicly. The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft over AI use of its articles in 2023.