The New York Times sues Brave over AI scraping and its paywall blocker

On 2 November 2026, The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Brave Software in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The complaint calls Brave "the supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content for its own users and many of the most prominent GenAI companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere." The same day, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar complaint in the same court, Ars Technica reports.

What the lawsuit says Brave does with news

According to the complaint, Brave built its own search index by copying billions of websites. Through the Brave Search API, it says, "AI companies pay Brave to provide them with real-time online content from the Brave search index", and use it to train their models, to answer user queries through retrieval-augmented generation, or both. The publishers' complaint points to Brave's own product pages, including a "News" index and an "LLM Context" endpoint.

Citing third-party revenue estimates, the Times claims "Brave has made more than $100 million by copying and reselling publishers' work without consent or permission", while "publishers have received nothing", as quoted by Ars Technica.

The suit alleges direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, covering the search index, the "Ask Brave" AI search feature and the API, plus a violation of the DMCA for circumventing access controls (Ars Technica).

The paywall blocker and the ad swap

The second target is the browser. "The Brave Browser includes a default setting that, when activated, causes the browser to go behind website paywalls and provide the paywalled content to the user," the lawsuit says, quoted by Ars Technica. It adds that the browser blocks the ads on the Times' site and "instead shows its own ads, offering its users a cut of the revenue". Ars Technica tested Brave for Mac and was able to read a paywalled Times article with the optional "paywall blocker" feature, which was on in the default settings and can be turned off.

The Times asks for a permanent injunction, statutory and actual damages, and disgorgement of the revenue from what it calls Brave's "ad-substitution scheme" (Ars Technica).

The responses so far

Brave had not responded to Ars Technica at the time of publication. Perplexity, which is not a defendant here but faces its own Times lawsuit filed in December 2025, called the suit "disinformation" in a statement to Ars, without naming a specific inaccuracy. The Verge also covered the filings, first reported by Reuters.

Why it matters

Many AI assistants do not crawl the whole web themselves: they buy search results from an index like Brave's. This suit goes after that middle layer. If it succeeds, AI companies that rely on third-party search APIs could face higher costs or narrower news coverage in their answers. For advertisers, the case is also about who gets paid when an article is read: the publisher whose ads ran, or the software that replaced them.