New York Times and Three Tribune Papers Sue Brave Over AI Scraping and Paywall Bypass

The suits were filed on Monday. One comes from the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, which are published by MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing. The Times filed its own complaint. Brave is best known for its privacy-focused web browser and its independent search engine, and the cases put it among the growing number of technology companies that news publishers are suing over AI.

What the Publishers Allege

Both cases centre on the Brave Search API, which lets other companies pull web content from Brave's index. TheWrap reported that the three papers' 69-page complaint names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as companies that have used Brave's services. The Next Web reported that both complaints name the same five customers and cite a Brave blog post saying Anthropic used the API to train Claude 2. According to The Next Web, Brave's marketing describes the API as being used "in training and grounding several of the Web's biggest large language models."

The publishers also criticise Ask Brave, the company's AI answer feature. According to TheWrap, the complaints say it produced more than 1,200 words from a Chicago Tribune article on data centre tax breaks and almost 600 words from a Daily News story about Central Park horse carriages. The papers also say a paywall-blocking setting in Brave's browser lets people read subscription articles without logging in. They add that the browser blocks publishers' ads by default while Brave sells advertising of its own.

The Alden papers' complaint calls Brave a "burglar" and an AI "fence" that sells stolen content, The Next Web reported. Steven Lieberman, the lawyer for the three papers, told TheWrap: "Buying stolen goods secondhand doesn't make them legitimate."

In its 72-page complaint, the Times says it sent cease-and-desist letters to Brave chief executive Brendan Eich in August 2025 and April 2026 and got no reply, according to TheWrap.

The three papers bring claims of direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, circumvention of technical protections under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and unjust enrichment under New York law. The Next Web reported that they want statutory and actual damages, repayment of profits, a permanent injunction and a jury trial. They say more than two million of their registered articles are affected. Their complaint puts Brave's 2025 revenue at more than $100 million and its user base at about 130 million people a month.

Brave's Position

Brave did not immediately respond to TheWrap's request for comment. The company has previously argued that its search practices are fair use. In March 2025 it sued News Corp, asking a court to declare that its web indexing is lawful, and News Corp countersued in July. None of the publishers' allegations has been tested in court.

Why It Matters

Until now, most publisher litigation has targeted the companies that build AI models. These cases instead go after a supplier of the web data those companies use to train their models and to ground answers in current information. The Times and the Alden papers already have separate copyright suits pending against OpenAI and Microsoft.

Publishers in other countries are taking similar steps. Press Gazette's latest roundup of AI lawsuits and licensing deals includes a suit that Canadian publishers, among them Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press, filed against Anthropic in an Ontario court in October. In Europe on Tuesday, an adviser to the EU's top court said chatbot answers built from news articles can, in some cases, breach press publishers' rights.

For companies that use AI search and retrieval tools, the cases raise a question about where those tools get their content and on what terms.