New York Times and three US newspapers sue Brave, alleging it sells access to their journalism to AI firms

According to TheWrap on 2 November 2026, The New York Times, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed separate lawsuits in Manhattan federal court against Brave Software, a browser and AI search company. The newspapers claim Brave took their copyrighted reporting without asking or paying and sells access to it to AI companies.

• According to the three papers' 69-page complaint, the content is distributed through the Brave Search API, a service AI firms use to pull web content into their products; the complaint lists Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere among companies that have used Brave's services.
• The complaint says Brave's AI search tool, Ask Brave, generated more than 1,200 words from a single Chicago Tribune article.
• The Times' 72-page complaint says cease-and-desist letters sent in August 2025 and April 2026 went unanswered and that Brave lets users get around its paywall.
• According to Press Gazette, the three papers also allege that Brave blocks publishers' ads and shows its own instead.

Why it matters

According to TheWrap, Brave had not yet replied to its request for comment when the story ran; in the past the company has argued that its search practices count as fair use. News Corp, which Brave had sued first, countersued in July with similar claims. The cases show that search services supplying content to AI companies can also end up in copyright disputes. For Turkish companies that use third-party search APIs in AI applications, clarifying the supplier's content sources and licensing status in the contract may be a point worth attention.