The New York Times and Tribune newspapers sue Brave for scraping and reselling their articles to AI companies
Confirmed
The takeaway
On Nov 2, 2026 the New York Times sued Brave in federal court in Manhattan, calling it a ‘supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content’ whose search index was sold to AI companies the suit names as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 3 November 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra186 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5125 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Argon216 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7155 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 125 days before it.
Key facts
- Court: federal court in Manhattan (SDNY); injunction and damages sought
- Claims: an index of 30B+ pages built with an unidentified crawler publishers cannot block; a paywall-bypassing browser feature; blocking publishers’ ads while selling its own
- AI customers named in the suit: Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, Cohere
- Brave did not immediately comment (TechCrunch); Brave and News Corp have been in litigation since 2025-2026
What happened
See summary.
Why it matters
It targets the data supplier behind several AI labs’ search grounding rather than the labs themselves.
Sources
3 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
3 sources: 3 press
Press
- TechCrunch: New York Times and other outlets sue Brave (Nov 2)techcrunch.com, press
- The Verge: NYT sues Brave for AI scraping and bypassing paywallstheverge.com, press
- Semafor: News Corp accuses Brave of AI copyright infringement (July 2026)semafor.com, press
Changes
- Filed