New York Times and three papers sue Brave over AI search index

The New York Times Company, and separately the publishers of the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, sued Brave Software on November 2, 2026, filing two federal complaints in the Southern District of New York that accuse the Brave browser and search company of copying their journalism into an index it sells to AI companies, of reproducing paywalled articles through its own AI answers, and of replacing their advertising with its own.

The Times's case is 26-cv-9549; the second, brought by Daily News, LP, Chicago Tribune Company, LLC and Orlando Sentinel Communications Company, LLC, is 26-cv-9554, according to PPC Land. Both name Brave Software, Inc. as the only defendant, both demand a jury trial, and both are signed by the plaintiffs' attorney Steven Lieberman of Rothwell, Figg, Ernst & Manbeck.

Each complaint pleads five counts: direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement; circumvention under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 1201, aimed at the browser's paywall blocker; and unjust enrichment under New York law, aimed at Brave's practice of blocking the newspapers' ads and selling its own. The unjust enrichment count, both complaints state, does not depend on any copying.

Most of each filing is evidence, but one shared line will travel. "Brave acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content to third parties," both complaints state. "And the third parties are serving as the knowing receivers of that stolen content, which they have used to build their trillion dollar businesses."

The Times complaint describes tests the plaintiffs ran against Ask Brave, Brave's AI chat product, and against the Brave Search API it sells to other companies. Told to pull up the full text of a paywalled article, Ask Brave "output over 400 words from The Times's article, verbatim," the filing says. Asked for "the most reputable newspaper's most prominent article today," it named a Times story and produced nearly 700 words of it. The Brave Search API's LLM Context endpoint returned 1,291 of 1,295 words of a Times article, verbatim, according to the complaint.

The three other papers report similar results in their complaint: Ask Brave produced more than 1,200 words of a Chicago Tribune article about data center tax breaks and nearly 600 words of a Daily News article on Central Park horse carriages.

Brave's own AI page, cited in both filings, says the index holds "over 30 billion webpages." Brave Search answers more than 50 million queries per day, and a third of those queries lead to an AI-generated response, the Times complaint states, quoting Brave's page. The complaints name Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as API customers. None is a defendant.

Both suits seek statutory and actual damages, restitution of profits, a permanent injunction, costs and attorneys' fees, and a jury trial.

Brave had not answered either complaint as of November 3. TheWrap reported that Brave did not immediately respond to its request for comment, and PPC Land, citing TechBuzz, reported no public response from Brave on the day of filing. Perplexity's chief communications officer, Jesse Dwyer, gave The Verge a statement of his own: "The New York Times is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists. (Who could've easily identified the disinformation in this suit.)"

The filings extend a run of publisher litigation against AI companies. The Times and the Daily News plaintiffs are also suing OpenAI and Microsoft, where five plaintiff groups and the companies moved for summary judgment on September 4, 2026. The Times and the Chicago Tribune each sued Perplexity in December 2025. Brave faces a separate dispute with News Corp, which countersued in July 2026 after Brave sought a declaration that its indexing is fair use.

For creators, the case tests where AI answers draw their material. An injunction against "the unlawful conduct alleged herein" would, read literally, reach the index, Ask Brave, the API endpoints, the paywall blocker and the ad replacement at once. The complaints are allegations; no court has ruled.

Brave's answer to both complaints is the next procedural step, and no response date appears in the filings.