The New York Times and three other newspapers have sued Brave Software, accusing the company of letting browser users bypass subscription paywalls and selling AI companies access to copyrighted reporting it copied without permission.
The Times filed its complaint on November 2 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel filed a separate complaint in the same court that day. The Times says it sent two letters demanding that Brave stop using its content in August 2025 and April 2026, and received no response.
Brave is best known for its privacy-focused browser, which blocks ads and trackers. It also operates a search engine with its own web index. That index powers the company’s Ask Brave feature, which draws on web pages to generate answers, and its paid Search API, which gives developers access to web content for their own applications.
From search results to article text
The publishers allege that Brave copied their reporting into its index and made it available to AI companies for model training or for retrieving material when users ask questions. Brave’s documentation describes an API endpoint called LLM Context that returns extracted web content for AI applications. The complaints also allege that Ask Brave itself returns detailed summaries and verbatim passages from copyrighted articles.
In one example documented by the Times, a query using the headline of an article about a robot theme park returned 1,291 of its 1,295 words verbatim through LLM Context. The other publishers say the same endpoint returned the full text of an Orlando Sentinel article about a Florida ballot measure. Those examples show what the publishers say the API returned in their tests. The complaints separately allege that AI customers used index material for training.
The lawsuits also challenge how Brave identifies its crawler. The publishers say the lack of a distinct user-agent identifier makes it impossible to block Brave’s crawler specifically. Brave says it omits the identifier because some websites allow only Google to crawl them, and that its bot skips pages Googlebot cannot crawl.
Paywalls and advertising
The complaints also target Brave’s browser setting called Paywall blocker. The joint complaint includes screenshots that the publishers say show Brave opening subscription articles from the Daily News and Chicago Tribune without a login. The publishers separately allege that Brave profits by blocking their ads and displaying its own.
Both lawsuits allege direct and secondary copyright infringement, violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions, and unjust enrichment tied to advertising. The publishers seek damages, profits, and a permanent injunction barring the alleged conduct. Brave has yet to publicly respond to the lawsuits at the time of writing.
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