New York Times filed a copyright complaint against Brave Software in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on November 2, 2026, alleging the browser maker scraped Times content to feed AI companies and built tools that let users bypass publisher paywalls1,2.
A parallel complaint was filed by the companies that operate the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel, according to The Verge.
Brave Index as AI pipeline
The complaints allege Brave Software monetized its web-crawling operation by selling AI companies paid access to real-time online content from Brave Index. The AI companies allegedly use that index to train models and to retrieve content when responding to user queries. The complaint names Anthropic, Perplexity AI, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere among the AI companies that allegedly received what the filing calls stolen copyrighted content.
Brave Index currently includes over 30 billion webpages, with millions of new pages indexed each day, according to the complaint. The Brave Search API handles billions of API calls weekly, the filing states. A third of Brave Search queries lead to an AI-generated response, and Brave Search answers more than 50 million queries per day, the complaint alleges.
Brave added an AI feature called Ask Brave to Brave Search in 2025, the complaint states. Brave Browser also includes LEO, a built-in AI assistant that can summarize webpages and generate content such as articles, according to the filing.
Paywall bypass and ad stripping
Beyond the AI-scraping claims, the complaint alleges Brave Browser blocks advertising by default and strips Times advertising from Times webpages. Brave Browser includes a default setting called Paywall blocker that allows users to bypass paywalls and access shielded content, the filing states. Brave promotes hundreds of top publishers as accessible through that feature, according to The Verge.
The complaint states that New York Times sent Brave a cease-and-desist letter on August 11, 2025, followed by a second letter on April 13, 2026.
Financial stakes
Brave is currently worth about $980 million, according to the complaint. The filing states Brave's 2025 revenue passed $100 million, up from about $52 million in 2024. Brave was founded in 2015 by Brendan Eich and Brian Bondy and was recognized for having taken relatively little outside capital compared to its peers, the complaint notes.
New York Times, represented by Rothwell, Figg, Ernst & Manbeck, P.C., demands a jury trial. The complaint states that New York Times had more than 13 million subscribers as of June 30, 2026, and owns over 10 million registered, copyrighted works.
ANALYSIS The suit opens a new front in publisher litigation against the AI supply chain, targeting not a model developer but an intermediary whose index allegedly pipes copyrighted material to multiple AI companies at once. The named AI buyers — Anthropic, Perplexity AI, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere — face potential discovery exposure even though they are not defendants in this action.
No public response from Brave Software was recorded in the available reporting.