New York Times sues Brave over search index sold to AI companies
What this answers
- Why is the New York Times suing Brave?
- The Times says Brave scraped its copyrighted articles to build a search index of more than 30 billion webpages and then supplied that content to AI companies, per TechCrunch's reading of the complaint. The Times seeks an injunction (a court order to stop) and damages.
- Which AI companies does the New York Times lawsuit against Brave name?
- The complaint names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as Brave customers, per TechCrunch. Brave had not responded to a request for comment.
The New York Times sued Brave on Nov 2 in federal court in Manhattan, alleging the browser and search company scraped its copyrighted content and distributed it without permission to AI customers the suit names as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere, per TechCrunch. The Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed a similar suit the same day. The complaint says Brave built an index of more than 30 billion webpages with a crawler it does not identify, so publishers cannot block it, and also targets a Brave feature that bypasses paywalls and the company’s practice of blocking publishers’ ads while selling its own. The Times asks for an injunction (a court order to stop) and damages; Brave had not responded to a request for comment.
Why it matters: The Times is aiming at a supplier of search data rather than at an AI answer engine, which tests whether a search index sold to AI companies counts as distributing copied content.
The record: AI training & copyright litigationPerplexityAnthropic
Via TechCrunch AI ↗
Posted to the wire November 2, 2026. Edited by Joe Balewski.