The New York Times and three other newspapers sued Brave on Monday, saying it scraped their articles and sold them to AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere through its Search API.

The New York Times filed its lawsuit against Brave Software in federal court in Manhattan on Monday (NYT complaint). The Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a similar but separate suit the same day (TechCrunch). The Times calls Brave "the supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" for its own users and for AI companies it names as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. It says Brave "acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content to third parties." The complaint says Brave's search index holds "over 30 billion webpages." It also says Brave has never disclosed the name of the crawler that builds it, so sites can't block it. The suits also go after a "Paywall blocker" feature in the Brave browser, and Brave's practice of blocking publishers' ads while selling its own (The Verge). The Times says it sent Brave CEO Brendan Eich letters in August 2025 and April 2026 asking it to stop, and that Brave ignored both. It wants an injunction and damages. Brave didn't immediately comment. Perplexity's communications chief told The Verge that the Times "is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists." The Times has already sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims. These are allegations, and none of them has been tested in court yet.

What to watch: Brave's formal reply, and whether any of the AI companies named are added to the case or change how they get web results. Brave's Search API sits behind the web search in several AI tools. A court order against it could change what sources those tools can show you. Nothing changes for users today.