Brave sued over its Brave Search API, with a complaint alleging Times articles reached AI companies

The New York Times Co. sued Brave Software on Nov. 2 in federal court in Manhattan, alleging that Brave copied the Times's journalism into the index behind Brave Search and then supplied it to AI companies through the Brave Search API. Brave had not commented publicly as of 2:45 p.m. ET on Nov. 2. Everything below is what the Times's complaint alleges, not something a court has found.

What the complaint alleges

A complaint is the document that starts a lawsuit. It lays out one side's version of events, and the other side has not yet answered it. The case is Times v. Brave Software, Inc., No. 1:26-cv-09549, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (docket). The Times asks for a jury trial.

The complaint alleges that Brave built its search engine by crawling and copying billions of web pages into what Brave calls the Brave Index. The complaint quotes Brave describing that index as "over 30 billion webpages." It alleges Brave never named its crawler or gave website owners a way to block it.

From there, the complaint describes two products. The first is Ask Brave, an AI feature in Brave Search that, the complaint alleges, answers questions using copied publisher content instead of sending readers to the publishers' sites.

The second is the Brave Search API. The complaint alleges the API supplies Brave Index content to AI companies, and it names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. It also alleges an "Answers" endpoint of the API runs on the same service as Ask Brave. The complaint calls Brave "the supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content," which is the Times's characterization.

The third claim concerns the Brave browser. The complaint says the browser has a setting called "Paywall blocker," which the complaint says Brave promotes as a way to "Bypass Paywalls," and alleges it gets around the Times's paywall. That is the basis for a claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the U.S. law that bars circumventing technical access controls.

The complaint alleges the Times sent Brave's CEO a cease-and-desist letter in August 2025 and a second letter on April 13, 2026, and that Brave ignored both. The second letter, as quoted in the complaint, warned of enhanced damages of up to $150,000 per infringement for willful infringement.

The five counts and what the Times wants

The complaint has five counts: direct copyright infringement, contributory infringement, vicarious infringement, circumventing access controls under the DMCA, and unjust enrichment under New York law.

The complaint seeks statutory or actual damages, restitution of Brave's profits, a permanent injunction and costs. It does not demand a specific dollar amount. The "$100 million" figure in the complaint is an allegation about Brave's earnings, that Brave "has made more than $100 million by copying and reselling publishers' work without consent." It is not what the Times is asking a court to award.

A second suit, filed the same day

Daily News LP v. Brave Software, Inc., No. 1:26-cv-09554 in the same court, was filed Nov. 2 by Daily News LP, Chicago Tribune Company, LLC and Orlando Sentinel Communications Company, LLC. The docket lists the case as copyright infringement (17 U.S.C. 501) with a jury demanded (docket).

What this means for you

If you use Brave, nothing in the complaint changes how the browser or Brave Search works today. The Times asks a court for a permanent injunction, but nothing has been decided. We found no ruling and no schedule in what we reviewed.

The case is more relevant if you build on search APIs or use AI tools that rely on them. The Times is arguing that supplying copied articles to AI companies through an API is itself infringement. Whether a court agrees is the open question, and it could take a long time to answer. For now, treat the claims as claims.

Related reading: how banks and Yelp are shutting AI agents out, the robots.txt opt-out signal that Google, OpenAI and Microsoft plan to honor, and Disney's bid for Character.AI's technology in bankruptcy, a different AI legal fight.

What we checked

We read the Times's complaint on CourtListener and checked the counts, the named AI companies, the Brave Index figure, the Paywall blocker passages and the two letters against its text. We checked the Daily News docket entry for the case number, plaintiffs, filing date, cause of action and jury demand only. We have not tested the Search API or the Paywall blocker, and we have not verified any allegation independently. Brave had not commented publicly as of 2:45 p.m. ET on Nov. 2.