Key facts
- The Times alleged Brave built an index of more than 30 billion webpages using an unidentified crawler, leaving publishers unable to block it.
- The suit says Brave distributed the content to Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere.
- The Times likened Brave in the filing to a supplier and distributor of stolen copyrighted content for AI companies.
- The suit also targets a Brave feature that bypasses paywalls and the company's practice of blocking publishers' ads while selling its own.
- Brave, founded in 2015, has raised roughly $250 million to date, according to private-market trackers.
- The Times seeks an injunction and damages; Brave did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The New York Times sued Brave, the privacy-focused browser company founded in 2015, in federal court in Manhattan on Monday, November 2, 2026, alleging it scraped the outlet's copyrighted content and unlawfully distributed it to customers the suit names as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere.
The filing likens Brave to a "supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" for AI companies. "In this way, Brave acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content to third parties," the suit says.
The Times alleged Brave built an index of more than 30 billion webpages using an unidentified crawler, leaving publishers unable to block it. The suit also targets a Brave browser feature that bypasses paywalls and the company's practice of blocking publishers' ads while selling its own.
Brave has raised roughly $250 million to date, according to private-market trackers. The Times seeks an injunction and damages. Brave did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Separately on the same day, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar lawsuit, also in federal court in Manhattan. The Times has also sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims.