New York Times and Other Publishers Sue Brave, Alleging Its AI Search Copies News Content
The New York Times Company filed a federal lawsuit against Brave Software on November 2, 2026, alleging that it copied and distributed news content without authorization through its search index, AI services, and browser; the publishers of the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel filed a separate lawsuit in the Southern District of New York the same day. The two complaints state that Brave's index contains more than 30 billion web pages, that Ask Brave feeds content into large language models via RAG, and that testing produced cases including a verbatim return of more than 400 words and the API's LLM Context endpoint returning 1,291 of 1,295 words as original text; they also allege that the browser's "Paywall blocker" setting can display paid articles and replace publishers' ads with Brave Ads. The publishers seek statutory and actual damages, disgorgement of profits, attorneys' fees, and a permanent injunction, and demand a jury trial.
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The two lawsuits place search indexing, RAG question-answering, and paywall circumvention within the same set of allegations, offering a concrete look at how evidence is being gathered in the dispute over licensing of news content.
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The New York Times Company filed a federal complaint against Brave Software on November 2, 2026, alleging unauthorized copying and distribution of its journalism through Brave’s search index, AI services and browser. The publishers of the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed a separate complaint against Brave the same day in the Southern District of New York.
Search Index and AI Services
Both complaints quote Brave as saying its index contains more than 30 billion webpages, with millions of new pages added daily, and allege that the company has not disclosed its crawler’s name or provided a way for site owners to block that crawler specifically.
Ask Brave sends content copied into the index to a large language model through retrieval-augmented generation, then displays answers that the Times says can include verbatim text or detailed summaries. The process supplies external material to the model to ground its response to a user’s query.
The publishers allege that AI companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere, pay Brave for real-time index content used to train models, ground answers to user queries, or both.
The Brave Search application programming interface (API) includes endpoints called News Search, Web Search, LLM Context and Answers. According to Brave documentation quoted in the complaints, LLM Context returns extracted page chunks and source metadata without requiring further scraping, while Answers powers the same service used by Ask Brave.
Reproduction Tests and Browser Practices
The Times says its tests produced extensive article text rather than only links or short snippets. In one example, Ask Brave returned more than 400 words verbatim after being given a paywalled article’s URL and then asked for the full text. Other examples produced nearly 700 words from another article and approximately 87% of a third. A separate query to the API’s LLM Context endpoint returned 1,291 of 1,295 words from an article verbatim.
The publishers’ complaint says their tests produced extensive Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel text through Ask Brave and API endpoints. Examples include more than 1,200 words from a Chicago Tribune investigation and an Orlando Sentinel article returned in full through LLM Context.
Both suits target the browser’s “Paywall blocker” setting, alleging that the configured browser copies and displays paywalled articles without a login or subscription. The filings include comparisons in which another browser shows a subscription restriction while Brave displays article text.
The complaints also allege that Brave removes publisher advertising, including subscription prompts, and substitutes advertising sold through Brave Ads. The Times’ filing includes a comparison in which a subscription banner visible in Google Chrome is absent in Brave.
Prior Notice and Legal Claims
The Times describes two unanswered letters to Brave CEO Brendan Eich: an August 11, 2025 letter from its intellectual-property counsel demanding an end to unauthorized access and use and removal of its intellectual property, and an April 13, 2026 letter from outside counsel repeating the demand.
The April 2026 letter argued that the alleged willful infringement warranted enhanced statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringement.
The plaintiffs seek statutory and actual damages, restitution of profits, costs and attorneys’ fees, and permanent injunctions against the alleged conduct. Both complaints demand jury trials for all claims eligible for them.
Whether the reproduced article text, paywall displays and advertising substitution amount to infringement, access-control circumvention or unjust enrichment remains for the court to decide under the legal theories presented in the two complaints.