Four American newspapers have taken Brave Software to court. Brave makes the privacy-focused Brave browser.
The papers say the company copied their journalism and passed it to artificial intelligence firms without permission. Reports on the case say the suits were filed on November 2, 2026.
Four newspapers take Brave to court in New York
The cases were filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The two lawsuits were filed separately. The New York Times filed its complaint on its own. The New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed a joint case together.
According to the complaints, Brave collected articles from the publishers’ websites. The company then offered that material through its search index and other services. AI developers used those services. The publishers say they never agreed to any of this.
The lawsuits name five AI companies as alleged recipients of the content. They are Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. However, none of them is a defendant. Reports confirm that Brave alone faces the publishers’ claims.
That detail has drawn attention online. Many people ask whether firms that receive content through a middleman should also face legal questions. The courts have not answered that yet. The complaints simply do not target those firms.
Publishers target Brave’s Crawler, search index and Paywall tool
The New York Times calls Brave a supplier and distributor of copyrighted material. It says Brave got that material without approval. Its complaint says Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages. The filing adds that the company used a crawler that publishers could not properly identify. That made it hard for them to block it.
The newspapers also say Brave earned money from the collected content. They claim it sold AI companies paid access to the Brave Search index. Under the complaints, developers could use that data in two ways. They could train AI models with it. They could also pull it up when answering user questions.
The dispute covers more than AI training. The publishers also challenge a Brave browser feature called Paywall blocker. They say it lets users read articles that normally need a subscription. Readers would not have to pay for those stories.
Courts have also considered the legal responsibility of privacy technology providers in other cases. In July this year, the EU Court ruled that VPN providers are not liable simply because users can use their services to bypass geo-blocks.
The publishers raise a third complaint about advertising. They accuse Brave of blocking the ads that publishers place on their pages. They say the browser then shows its own ads instead. Publishers rely on ad income to fund their reporting.
The New York Times is asking for damages and a court order, also called an injunction. Reports say Brave did not respond to requests for comment when the story broke. The company has not yet shared its side in public.
Perplexity hits back while X users debate blame
Perplexity has already responded to the claims. Jesse Dwyer is the company’s chief communications officer. Reports say he criticised the lawsuit sharply. He said the newspaper spends too much money on lawyers. He also said it spends too little on journalists.
The case has also sparked debate on X. Users are asking who should carry the blame. Many focus on AI firms that allegedly got copyrighted material from outside suppliers.
The user @getmcpads asked why the scraper faces a lawsuit first. The user pointed out that the AI labs allegedly bought the material. That user wants to know why those labs are not in court.
Another user, @Dig_Deep_Mining, sees this case as different from earlier AI training fights. The user pointed to the paywall claim. Brave’s browser is also accused of making paid articles free to read. That adds a new layer to the dispute.
The user @mbrgbr questioned whether scraping news content is worth the trouble. The user did not explain further. Meanwhile, @KeithZhai asked a narrower question. Did Brave’s crawler really reach content behind the publishers’ paywalls? The complaints leave that point open in the discussion.
Some users worry about wider effects. The user @TornadoWolfVT said the case could reach beyond Brave; the user warned that it might become an attempt to make website scraping illegal in general.
The user @MrClicker_1 asked where a line should be drawn. A privacy-focused browser is one thing. A business that supplies information to AI companies is another. The user wondered when the first turned into the second.
The user @raulnogales shared a related view. Browsers now do more than open websites, because AI answers have become part of browsing. This raises hard questions about credit and payment. Publishers’ content may power those answers, so the user asked who deserves a share.
For now, the lawsuits remain allegations. No court has ruled that Brave broke the publishers’ copyrights. The cases could still become a major part of the growing legal fight between news publishers and AI companies. That fight centres on how online content is used to build AI products.
