New York Times Sues Brave for Selling Scraped News to AI Firms
Three more newspapers filed a similar suit the same day, and the Times says publishers have no way to block Brave's crawler.
The New York Times sued Brave on November 2, saying the privacy browser scraped its journalism and sold it to AI companies.
Run a site with ads or a paywall? The complaint describes a crawler that, the Times says, you have no way to block.
Three more papers, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, filed a similar suit the same day. Both cases are in federal court in Manhattan, TechCrunch reports.
The Times wants an injunction and damages. Brave hadn’t commented when TechCrunch published.
What the Times says Brave did
The suit says Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages with a crawler it doesn’t identify. So publishers can’t block it, the Times argues.
Then, it says, Brave sold access through its Search API. The customers the suit names are Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere.
The Times calls Brave a “supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content” for AI companies.
Search Engine Journal’s read of the complaint lists the other claims:
- Ask Brave, the AI chat, reproduces and summarizes Times articles instead of sending readers to the site.
- The browser lets users get around the Times paywall.
- Brave removes the Times’ ads and shows its own.
- Brave’s own marketing pitches its Search API for AI training, grounding and content extraction.
- Brave ignored cease-and-desist letters sent in August 2025 and April 2026, which the Times uses to argue the infringement was willful.
These are allegations. No court has tested them yet.
Not the Times’ first AI case
Here are the AI companies the Times has now sued over similar claims:
- OpenAI
- Perplexity
- Brave, sued on November 2
But Brave is a different kind of target.
Brave sells itself as the privacy-first alternative to Google, with its own search index.
I’d guess most of your readers know it as the browser that blocks trackers and ads, and some may read your site in it every day.
But the suit treats it as a data supplier to AI labs. I doubt many site owners knew that part.
Why it matters
Do you block AI bots in your robots.txt?
Maybe your file names the usual ones:
- GPTBot (OpenAI)
- ClaudeBot (Anthropic)
- Google-Extended (Google)
And you felt covered.
A crawler with no name can’t be named in that list. So it slips past.
If the Times is right, your pages could still reach Anthropic or Perplexity through Brave’s API, whatever your robots.txt says.
That’s why the push for one robots.txt rule for AI training matters to you.
Still, a rule only works on bots that say who they are, and the Times says this one doesn’t.
The ad claim
This one hits closer to home for most of you.
Run a recipe blog or a review site on display ads? SEJ’s read: if Brave strips the Times’ ads, it may strip yours.
SEJ is inferring that from the Times’ case. A court hasn’t ruled on any of it.
My read: this case is about who pays for the content behind AI answers. Bing already lets you split AI training from grounding.
Brave’s API, as the Times describes it, sells your pages for both, and you never get asked.
- Training: the pages go into a model.
- Grounding: the pages feed an answer in real time.
You’d want a say in each.
Anyway, check your server logs. Traffic you can’t name is worth a closer look.
Common Questions
Why is The New York Times suing Brave browser in 2026?
The New York Times says Brave scraped its articles with an unidentified crawler and sold them to AI companies through the Brave Search API. It also says Brave’s browser bypasses its paywall and replaces its ads.
Which AI companies does the New York Times lawsuit say used Brave’s data?
The complaint names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as Brave customers, according to TechCrunch. The Times has separately sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims.
Can I block Brave’s crawler with robots.txt?
The New York Times says publishers can’t, because Brave’s crawler doesn’t identify itself. Brave hadn’t commented when TechCrunch reported the lawsuit on November 2, 2026.
