Daily News, Tribune, and Sentinel alleged Brave Software monetized its web index by providing AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere paid access to real-time online content from the Brave Index

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The New York Times spokesperson Graham James stated the publisher repeatedly asked Brave Software to stop using its journalism prior to filing its lawsuit on November 2, 2026.

Brave Software previously sued News Corp in March 2025 seeking a fair use declaration for web indexing, and News Corp countersued Brave Software for theft in July.

The New York Times and Alden Global Capital-owned newspapers previously filed separate copyright lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft over AI training.

Complaints filed against Brave Software allege the company acts like a burglar misappropriating publisher content and an AI fence selling stolen content to third parties.

Steven Lieberman, an attorney for MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, stated that Brave Software is selling AI companies a back door to journalism and laundering pirated reporting.

Publishers of the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel filed a separate lawsuit against Brave Software in Manhattan federal court on November 2, 2026.

Brave Software allegedly provided scraped publisher content through paid access to artificial intelligence developers including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.

The lawsuits allege that Brave Software promotes a Paywall blocker browser setting allowing users to bypass subscription paywalls for top publishers without logging in.

AI developers Anthropic, Perplexity, and xAI were not named as defendants in the copyright lawsuits filed against Brave Software on November 2, 2026.

The New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel filed five claims against Brave Software including direct copyright infringement and DMCA technical protection circumvention.

The Brave Index contains over 30 billion web pages used to power Brave Search, with publishers alleging Brave Software hides the identity of its web crawler.

Brave Software cited in a blog post that Anthropic used its Search API to train the Claude 2 artificial intelligence model.

The lawsuit filed by Alden Global Capital-owned newspapers affects more than two million registered articles and seeks statutory damages, actual damages, profit repayment, and a jury trial.

Publishers allege that Brave Software's Ask Brave AI feature reproduces news content by returning word-for-word passages and detailed article summaries.

Brave Software promotes a paywall blocker feature in its web browser that enables users to bypass paywalls of top publishers without permission or compensation, according to a lawsuit filed by the New York Daily News

Lawsuits filed on November 2, 2026 allege Brave Software provided stolen copyrighted reporting to AI firms to train artificial intelligence models and respond to user search queries

An attorney representing three publisher plaintiffs stated that Brave Software is laundering pirated reporting for the artificial intelligence industry

The New York Times previously filed separate copyright infringement lawsuits against artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Perplexity

In its November 2, 2026 court filing, The New York Times characterized Brave Software as a burglar misappropriating publisher content and an AI fence selling stolen content to third parties

Brave Software built an index of over 30 billion webpages using a crawler that prevents publishers from blocking access, according to a lawsuit filed on November 2, 2026