The New York Times and the New York Daily News sued Brave Software in Manhattan federal court, alleging that the browser maker copied their articles for AI-related uses and enabled users to access subscription material without paying. The papers also accuse Brave of selling their content to AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity and xAI; none of those companies is named as a defendant.
The Cases and Their Claims
The New York Times brought copyright infringement and Digital Millennium Copyright Act claims against Brave Software, according to mlex.com. The complaint alleges that Brave copied and distributed Times content to its users and other AI companies. The case, New York Times Co v. Brave Software Inc, is No. 1:26-cv-09549 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, while the related Daily News LP v. Brave Software Inc is No. 1:26-cv-09554 in the same court, according to Reuters. A separate complaint by the publishers of the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel makes similar allegations, The Next Web reported.
Steven Lieberman, affiliated with Rothwell Figg Ernst & Manbeck, represents the news outlets, Reuters reported. The wire service said attorney information for Brave was not yet available. Times spokesperson Graham James said Brave disregarded copyright law and the paper’s repeated requests to stop the alleged conduct, according to Reuters.
The Publishers’ Specific Allegations
According to thenextweb.com, the publishers allege that Brave's Ask Brave feature returns passages from their articles word for word and produces detailed summaries of their reporting. The same report describes Brave's Paywall blocker as a tool that allows users to access subscription content without logging in, while the company's browser blocks publishers' ads by default even as Brave sells its own advertising.
The publishers also challenge Brave’s handling of web content at scale. The Next Web describes Brave’s index as a collection of more than 30 billion web pages that powers Brave Search, and reports that the company sells access to a Search API. The three Alden-owned publications in the second suit say more than two million registered articles are affected. Their complaint cites figures that Brave reported more than $100 million in revenue in 2025 and roughly 130 million monthly users, the outlet reported.
The Dispute Over Redistribution
The publishers allege that Brave both copies their material and makes it available to third parties, Reuters reported. Mlex.com likewise describes the Times complaint as accusing Brave of copying and redistributing the paper’s content. These are claims in the lawsuits, not findings by the court.
Perplexity, which is not a defendant in either case, criticized the Times’ legal spending in relation to what it pays journalists, Reuters reported. The comment was a response to the publisher, not a detailed legal argument about the claims against Brave.
Part of a Wider Legal Fight
The dispute also comes amid a separate legal fight between Brave and News Corp. Brave sued News Corp in March 2025 seeking a declaration that its web indexing qualified as fair use, and News Corp countersued that July, according to The Next Web. Semafor reported that News Corp later accused Brave AI of disguising its web crawlers to avoid detection or blocking by publishers and delivering verbatim or near-verbatim news articles to enterprise customers, primarily AI firms. News Corp argued that Brave’s AI was not transformative because, in its view, it repeated information without adding anything new.
News organizations have also sued OpenAI over its AI training, Reuters reported. Some publishers have pursued licensing agreements: Semafor reported that News Corp struck a $250 million licensing deal with OpenAI in 2024 and later licensed content to Meta for $50 million a year. The publishers in the Brave cases also cite a study finding that AI crawlers generate 95.7% less referral traffic than traditional Google search, according to The Next Web. Referral traffic is one part of the financial stakes publishers say they face as AI tools change how people find news.
The Legal Questions
The claims invoke federal copyright law. Under 17 U.S.C. § 107, fair use of a copyrighted work for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research is not infringement, according to the U.S. Code as compiled by the House Office of the Law Revision Counsel. Separately, 17 U.S.C. § 1201 bars circumvention of a technological measure that effectively controls access to a protected work. Neither provision settles whether Brave’s alleged conduct amounts to fair use or unlawful circumvention; that is for the court to decide.
Related Rulings and Search Traffic
A separate fair-use ruling illustrates how much the analysis can turn on the technology and facts at issue. In a February 11, 2025, decision, a U.S. District Court in Delaware found that Ross’s use of Thomson Reuters headnotes to develop a competing, non-generative legal research tool was not transformative. The ruling concerned a different dispute and does not decide the claims against Brave, according to the court’s decision. The traffic concerns cited by publishers also sit within wider changes to search referrals. The Guardian reported that Chartbeat data for more than 2,500 news sites showed Google search traffic down 33% globally over a single year. That figure measures referrals, not publishers’ total audience reach, and the report discussed AI overviews and chatbots alongside search-algorithm changes.
