The New York Times says Brave resells its paywalled articles to AI companies

1,291 words out of 1,295. According to the New York Times, that is how much of one of its articles you get by simply typing its title into a service Brave sells to AI developers. The American newspaper made it one of the exhibits in the lawsuit filed on November 2 in federal court in Manhattan. The suit targets Brave Software, the publisher of the web browser of the same name, led by Brendan Eich.

The same day, in the same court, the publishers of the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed their own complaint. The Times says it sent cease-and-desist letters in August 2025 and April 2026, which went unanswered. These allegations have not yet been examined by a court.

What is the browser accused of?

The complaints target several Brave products:

• a setting called “Paywall blocker,” which would allow subscriber-only articles to be displayed without a subscription. The publishers of the Daily News and the Chicago Tribune attach screenshots in support;
• its search interface for developers (API) and its “LLM Context” feature, which returns text extracted from web pages to feed AI applications. The Times says it retrieved 1,291 of the 1,295 words of an article this way;
• Ask Brave, its conversational assistant, accused of reproducing passages word for word or detailed summaries that make reading the original unnecessary;
• its crawler, which does not identify itself with a distinctive name, which would prevent sites from blocking it in a targeted way.

Brave has already explained this last point. It says it does without an identifier so that it can index sites that only allow Google, and that it does not crawl pages barred to Google's crawler, CyberInsider notes. According to Next, the Times estimates that Brave earned more than $100 million from this content. It invokes several grounds:

• direct and indirect copyright infringement;
• circumvention of technical protection measures, under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA);
• unjust enrichment.

It seeks damages and disgorgement of profits. It also asks that Brave be barred from offering a way around paywalls and from selling access to its API to generative AI companies.

Anthropic and Mistral among the AI companies named

The complaint names five AI companies among those that allegedly received this content through Brave: Anthropic, Perplexity, France's Mistral, xAI and Cohere. None of them is being sued in this case. According to The Verge, cited by Next, Brave, Anthropic, Mistral and Cohere had not responded to its questions. Perplexity has already been sued by the Times since December 2025. It replied that the newspaper was paying its lawyers too much and its journalists too little, claiming the complaint contained errors without saying which, Ars Technica reports, as cited by Next.

Brave is no stranger to this ground. In July 2026, News Corp, Rupert Murdoch's group, had already accused it, in a counterclaim, of distributing its articles to AI companies, according to Semafor. Brave itself had gone to court in 2025 to have its indexing recognized as fair use, the copyright exception provided by U.S. law.

Why the case also matters to AI users in Europe

For an IT manager, the case raises a simple question: where do the pages that an AI assistant cites or summarizes come from? Many tools rely on third-party search engines to access the news. If U.S. courts find that some content was obtained there illegally, AI providers will have to review their sources, and their customers will have to reread their contracts. The issue is not unique to the United States. In Canada, news publishers are already accusing Anthropic of bypassing their technical protections to feed Claude.

Brave must now respond before the Manhattan court. Its defense will show whether it accepts its role as an intermediary between the press and AI, or whether it once again invokes fair use.