The New York Times and the publisher of the New York Daily News filed lawsuits against Brave Software, the maker of the Brave web browser, on Monday, November 2, 2026 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, according to heise online. The cases are 1:26-CV-09549, The New York Times Co. v. Brave Software Inc., and 1:26-CV-09554, Daily News LP v. Brave Software Inc. RuntimeWire, citing The Verge, says the publishers of the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel also filed suit. The claims below are the plaintiffs' allegations and have not been tested in court.

The allegations

The suits allege that Brave used the newspapers' articles to train AI models without permission, and that Brave's browser lets users bypass paywalls, which the suits describe as illegal. They also allege that Brave gave AI companies paid access to “real-time online content from the Brave index,” which those companies use to train models or to retrieve content for user queries. Anthropic, Perplexity and xAI are named as recipients of that access and are not defendants, heise reports. Citing The Verge, heise says Brave promotes access to “hundreds of leading media outlets” through a feature it calls a paywall blocker.

Quoting the complaint, heise reports: “Brave never asked the media companies for permission to access their websites.” The complaint also says Brave has never paid for the alleged unlawful use, reproduction and distribution of copyrighted content and took steps that make it impossible for the media companies to block its access. heise lists copyright infringement and unauthorized AI training as the claims and does not state the relief sought.

Responses

A New York Times spokesperson, who is not named, told Reuters that the paper supports ethical AI development but that Brave “has disregarded current copyright law,” and that Brave ignored repeated requests from the Times to stop the alleged infringement. No response from Brave, Anthropic, Perplexity or xAI is reported in the articles Lens read.

Background

heise notes that the Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, alleging unauthorized use of its texts to train ChatGPT and Copilot. In July, Semafor published a report headlined “News Corp accuses search engine Brave of AI copyright infringement.”

Sources and notes

Sources: heise online (Andreas Knobloch, November 2, English edition, machine-translated and editorially reviewed) and RuntimeWire (November 2, an excerpt that ends mid-article). The Semafor report is here; Lens did not read it. Lens did not open The Verge or Reuters originals or the complaints. The two sources Lens read give different levels of detail on plaintiffs, claims and relief, and heise names only the Times and the Daily News as plaintiffs. Search summaries of other outlets' coverage mention additional legal claims, which Lens has not used.

Image: Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse, Manhattan, New York (7237347688).jpg by Ken Lund, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; cropped. It shows the entrance of a federal courthouse in Manhattan used by the Southern District of New York; Lens did not establish which courthouse the cases are assigned to. Illustrative photo; it does not show the events described.