THE ESSENTIALS IN 30 SECONDS

  • The New York Times and, separately, the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel sued Brave Software in federal court in Manhattan on November 2.
  • The complaints target Brave's 30-billion-page index, its Search API sold to AI firms, the Ask Brave answer feature, a paywall-bypass setting and ad replacement.
  • Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere are named as API customers but are not defendants; Brave had not publicly responded on the day of filing.

Brave Software, maker of the Brave browser and Brave Search, faces two copyright lawsuits from US newspapers. The New York Times filed first on November 2 in federal court in Manhattan. Hours later, the Alden-owned publishers of the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a separate complaint in the same court.

What the publishers allege

Both suits focus on the Brave index, a collection of more than 30 billion web pages that powers Brave Search. The publishers say Brave built it with a crawler it never named, so sites could not block it specifically. Brave sells access to that index through its Search API, which its own marketing promotes for training and grounding large language models.

The complaints list five API customers: Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. None is a defendant. They also cite a 2023 Brave blog post saying Anthropic used the API to train Claude 2, although, as PPC Land notes, the filings do not establish which companies use the service today.

Other targets include Ask Brave, the search engine's AI answer feature, which allegedly reproduces passages verbatim and summarises articles closely enough to replace them; a browser setting that lets users get past paywalls; and Brave's default ad blocking, which removes publishers' ads while Brave sells its own. The Daily News group describes Brave as "an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content."

Claims and remedies

The three Alden papers bring five counts: direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, circumvention of technical protections under the DMCA, and unjust enrichment under New York law. They say more than two million registered articles are at stake. The Times, which cites over 10 million registered works, also claims willful infringement. It says Brave ignored cease-and-desist letters sent in August 2025 and April 2026.

The plaintiffs seek statutory and actual damages, disgorgement of profits, a permanent injunction and a jury trial; no total dollar figure is stated. According to the complaints, Brave has close to 130 million monthly users, and third-party estimates cited put its 2025 revenue above $100 million.

Context and open questions

Brave did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the day of filing, and it has not yet answered either complaint in court. The case adds to an existing dispute: in March 2025 Brave asked a court to declare its indexing of News Corp content fair use, and News Corp countersued in July 2026. None of the allegations has been tested in court.