The New York Times 11 2 filed a lawsuit against browser company Brave Software in federal court in Manhattan; on the same day, the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel filed a separate similar lawsuit. The complaint alleges that Brave used unidentified crawlers that publishers could not block to build an index of over 300 billion web pages, providing them to AI companies as paid "real-time web content" for training or answering user queries; the named clients in the complaint include Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. It also alleges that Brave browser's "Paywall blocker" helps users bypass paywalls. The New York Times is seeking an injunction and damages.
Confidence: Medium (75) · Event date 2026-11-02
Reasoning
- Previously, publishers primarily sued model companies directly (The New York Times has already sued OpenAI and Perplexity); this time, the target is the "middleman" supplying data to AI companies, with the complaint likening Brave to a "fence" selling stolen goods. If successful, AI products relying on third-party search APIs for web content will need to reassess their data sources.
- A Perplexity spokesperson has publicly rebutted the lawsuit; Brave, Anthropic, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere had not responded as of the time of reporting.
Usage
- Teams using the Brave Search API for retrieval-augmented generation or training data: monitor the progress of the lawsuit and Brave's response, and review your own data usage terms.
Risk
- The above are unilateral allegations by the plaintiffs and have not been determined by a court; editors did not read the original complaint, and the content is derived from reports by The Verge, TechCrunch, and Reuters as cited by them.