New York Times sues Brave over alleged sale of its journalism to AI companies

The New York Times sued Brave Software on November 2, 2026, alleging that the browser company scraped its copyrighted journalism and unlawfully distributed it to AI companies. The case, filed in Manhattan federal court, targets an alleged supplier of content—not just the developers using that material to build their own AI products.

The Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed a similar lawsuit separately that day, also in federal court in Manhattan. The Times’ filing and the other newspapers’ complaint are separate actions against Brave, rather than a single joint lawsuit.

Training models versus supplying customers

The Times’ allegations describe two uses for the journalism Brave allegedly collected. Bloomberg Law reports that the complaint accuses Brave of scraping articles to train its own large language models. It also alleges that Brave provided scraped content to other AI developers, including Anthropic and Perplexity.

The customer list in the Times’ suit extends further: it names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as recipients of content Brave allegedly distributed unlawfully, according to TechCrunch. Those names describe the publishers’ allegations about Brave’s customers, not a court finding that those companies received stolen material.

The Times also challenges the collection process itself. Its suit alleges that Brave built an index of more than 30 billion webpages using an unidentified crawler—software that automatically gathers web content—which publishers could not block. That figure describes the alleged size of the webpage index, not a count of Times articles.

The complaint also reaches into the browser

The Times’ objections are not limited to collecting articles or sending them to AI developers. The suit also challenges a Brave browser feature that allegedly bypasses paywalls, along with the company’s practice of blocking publishers’ advertisements while selling its own. These are additional targets within the same complaint.

The Times is seeking an injunction—a court order restricting the challenged conduct—and damages. Those are requested remedies, not an order already issued or compensation already awarded. Brave did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment, leaving its response to the allegations unavailable at publication.