The New York Times and other newspaper publishers have sued Brave Software in Manhattan federal court accusing the maker of the privacy-focused web browser of copyright infringement by scraping their articles for artificial intelligence training and helping users bypass subscription paywalls.
The lawsuits allege that Brave copied and distributed copyrighted news content without permission including by selling access to its web index to AI companies that use the material to train models and generate responses to user queries.
The New York Times accused Brave of supplying its content to AI developers including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere, according to the complaint.
The newspaper also challenged Brave’s browser features that allow users to circumvent paywalls, arguing that the company enables access to subscription content without payment while blocking publishers’ advertisements.
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Separately,
the New York Daily News,
Chicago Tribune, and
Orlando Sentinel
filed a similar lawsuit against Brave alleging that the company unlawfully collected and monetized their copyrighted material.
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The cases were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York as New York Times Co. v. Brave Software Inc., No. 1:26-cv-09549, and Daily News LP v. Brave Software Inc., No. 1:26-cv-09554.
The Times is seeking an injunction and damages, according to reports on the complaints.
Brave, founded in 2015, has built its reputation around privacy protection, advertising, and tracker blocking. Its browser also operates Brave Search, which relies on a web index containing more than 30 billion pages, according to a separate report by TechCrunch.
As of October 2026, Brave has over 130 million month users with over 2.71 billion searches, according to the CEO and Co-Founder, Brendan Eich.
The lawsuits add to growing legal disputes between publishers and technology companies over the use of copyrighted material to develop AI systems as media organizations seek compensation and greater control over how their reporting is used.
The Times has previously sued OpenAI and Microsoft over allegations that they used millions of its articles without permission to train AI systems. The companies have argued that such use of copyrighted material can qualify as fair use under U.S. copyright law.
Steven Lieberman of Rothwell Figg Ernst & Manbeck represents the news outlets. Attorney information for Brave was not immediately available.
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