The New York Times, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel sued Brave Software on Monday, accusing the web browser and AI search company of illegally copying their reporting and selling access to copyrighted content to artificial intelligence companies, including Anthropic and Perplexity.
The lawsuits, filed separately in Manhattan federal court, target Brave’s business of supplying AI companies with content collected from across the Internet. The publishers argue that Brave is profiting from their journalism without paying for it, potentially cutting into the subscription, advertising and licensing revenue on which they rely.
In a 69-page complaint,the Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel accused Brave of copying copyrighted articles and distributing their content through its Brave Search API, a service that allows AI companies to retrieve web content for use in their products. The filing identifies Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere among companies that have used Brave’s services.
The newspapers cite several examples of Brave’s AI search tool, Ask Brave, allegedly reproducing substantial portions of their reporting. According to the complaint, the tool generated more than 1,200 words from a Chicago Tribune article about tax breaks for data centers and nearly 600 words from a Daily News article about Central Park horse carriages.
The New York Times, in a separate 72-page complaint, said it repeatedly warned Brave to stop using its journalism without permission. The newspaper alleged that it sent cease-and-desist letters to Brave CEO Brendan Eich in August 2025 and April 2026 but received no response. The Times also accused Brave of reproducing its copyrighted reporting and allowing users to bypass its paywall.
“AI giants are now desperate to avoid getting caught red-handed stealing news from publishers, so Brave Software is selling them a back door to the journalism they know they have no right to,” Steven Lieberman, an attorney representing the Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel, said in a statement. “Buying stolen goods secondhand doesn’t make them legitimate.”
Brave did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
The company has previously defended its search practices as fair use. In July, News Corp, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, countersued Brave, accusing the company of scraping and reselling copyrighted journalism to AI developers without permission. Brave had earlier sued News Corp, seeking a ruling that its search practices were lawful.
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