The New York Times and three Tribune and Daily News titles sued Brave Software on 2 November in two separate complaints. They target the company that supplies AI firms, not the AI firms themselves.
The New York Times Company filed New York Times Co. v. Brave Software, No. 1:26-cv-09549, in the Southern District of New York on 2 November. Daily News LP, Chicago Tribune Company and Orlando Sentinel Communications Company filed a separate complaint, No. 1:26-cv-09554, the same day.
The descriptions of Brave's conduct below are the plaintiffs' claims, not court findings. Brave has not responded.
The allegations
Each complaint pleads five counts: direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, circumvention of technical protections under the DMCA, and unjust enrichment. Neither demands a sum. The NYT complaint names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as alleged recipients of material supplied by Brave, but none is a defendant.
Brave's index covers more than 30 billion pages, by its own count. Brave's crawler page says the bot has no distinct user agent and will not crawl any page Googlebot cannot. It says a noindex directive, not robots.txt, keeps a page out of the index. The complaint says Brave never disclosed the bot's name.
The complaint quotes Brave's LLM Context endpoint as returning page chunks "without need for further scraping", and News Search as adding up to five excerpts per result. The suits challenge whether Brave has the rights to collect and supply the material.
Terms and paywalls
A 2023 Brave guide, quoted in the complaint, lists the most common API uses as "training and grounding" large language models. Brave's current API terms, updated 1 September 2026, bar customers from caching results, reselling them or using them to train or improve AI models. These are standard terms; negotiated order forms can differ.
The DMCA count centres on the "Paywall blocker" setting in the Brave browser, which Brave describes as letting users bypass paywalls, and also covers the undisclosed crawler. Separately, in the Daily News complaint, Ask Brave listed 35 titles when asked for the day's Daily News articles, and offered their full text.
Money and precedent
The complaint alleges Brave made more than $100 million by copying and reselling publishers' work. It cites third-party reports of whole-company revenue passing $100 million in 2025, up from about $52 million in 2024. That is company-wide revenue, not revenue from the challenged conduct.
The Wall Street Journal reported Amazon pays the Times $20 million to $25 million a year for generative AI rights. That is context, not a measure of Brave's use. Brave, the complaint says, is not a licensee.
In August 2026 the court in the Times and Daily News case against OpenAI and Microsoft dismissed the publishers' material-contribution contributory claims tied to end-user infringement. Count II here is the same family of theory, but the reported ruling does not address vicarious claims such as Count III. On CTOL's reading, it does not reach the direct, DMCA and unjust enrichment counts.
Brave is in court with News Corp, which it sued in March 2025 for a declaration that its indexing and summaries are lawful. Dow Jones and NYP Holdings answered in July 2026 with counterclaims over what Brave takes in and what its Data for AI API sends out.
CTOL's view
In CTOL's view, the suits challenge Brave's role as a supplier to AI firms. Brave has not yet responded.
Its first substantive filing may show how it contests the copyright and DMCA theories separately. A change to its crawler user agent or API terms would be a separate sign of how the suits affect its products. The ruling on News Corp's motion to dismiss in N.D. Cal. 3:26-cv-04758 will say more about Brave, but decides nothing in these cases.