New York Times sues Brave Software over AI scraping and paywall circumvention

Nov 2, 2026

The New York Times and three regional newspapers filed federal lawsuits in Manhattan on November 2, 2026, accusing Brave Software of scraping copyrighted journalism to train artificial intelligence and selling data access to developers including Anthropic, Perplexity, and xAI. The complaints allege copyright infringement, DMCA violations, and paywall circumvention, accusing Brave of acting as an AI fence for stolen content. Perplexity dismissed the suit as disinformation, while publishers seek damages and a permanent injunction.

New lawsuits filed against Brave Software

▪The New York Times spokesperson Graham James stated the publisher repeatedly asked Brave Software to stop using its journalism prior to filing its lawsuit on November 2, 2026.
▪Publishers of the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel filed a separate lawsuit against Brave Software in Manhattan federal court on November 2, 2026.
▪Complaints filed against Brave Software allege the company acts like a burglar misappropriating publisher content and an AI fence selling stolen content to third parties.
▪The New York Times filed a lawsuit accusing Brave Software of scraping its articles to train AI models and selling access to the data

Brave features targeted in the lawsuits

▪Publishers allege that Brave Software's Ask Brave AI feature reproduces news content by returning word-for-word passages and detailed article summaries.
▪The lawsuits allege that Brave Software promotes a Paywall blocker browser setting allowing users to bypass subscription paywalls for top publishers without logging in.
▪The Brave Index contains over 30 billion web pages used to power Brave Search, with publishers alleging Brave Software hides the identity of its web crawler.

Details of the lawsuit by Alden-Owned papers

▪The New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel filed five claims against Brave Software including direct copyright infringement and DMCA technical protection circumvention.
▪Steven Lieberman, an attorney for MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, stated that Brave Software is selling AI companies a back door to journalism and laundering pirated reporting.
▪The lawsuit filed by Alden Global Capital-owned newspapers affects more than two million registered articles and seeks statutory damages, actual damages, profit repayment, and a jury trial.

Role of third-party AI developers

▪Brave Software cited in a blog post that Anthropic used its Search API to train the Claude 2 artificial intelligence model.
▪AI developers Anthropic, Perplexity, and xAI were not named as defendants in the copyright lawsuits filed against Brave Software on November 2, 2026.
▪Brave Software allegedly provided scraped publisher content through paid access to artificial intelligence developers including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.

Prior copyright disputes over AI scraping

▪The New York Times and Alden Global Capital-owned newspapers previously filed separate copyright lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft over AI training.
▪Brave Software previously sued News Corp in March 2025 seeking a fair use declaration for web indexing, and News Corp countersued Brave Software for theft in July.