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# Newspapers sue Brave, saying its search API sells their journalism to AI companies
- URL: https://venture-block.com/newspapers-nyt-sue-brave-search-api-ai/
- Published: 2026-11-04T14:07:03.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-04T14:07:03.000Z
- Description: The Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, the Orlando Sentinel and The New York Times filed suits in Manhattan, arguing Brave's search API hands their reporting to AI companies.
- Author: Venture Block
- Tags: Policy, AI

Three Tribune Publishing newspapers and The New York Times sued Brave Software in Manhattan federal court on Monday, alleging that the privacy-focused browser and search company copies their journalism into its own AI answers and sells it to other AI developers through its search API.

The [69-page complaint](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.676310/gov.uscourts.nysd.676310.1.0.pdf?ref=venture-block.com) from the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, filed as case 1:26-cv-09554 in the Southern District of New York, calls Brave "the supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" for its users and for AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. Those companies are not defendants. The Times filed [its own suit in the same court the same day](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/11/nyt-demands-brave-shut-down-its-paywall-blocker-and-end-deals-with-ai-firms/?ref=venture-block.com), with closely matching claims. None of the allegations has been tested in court.

## Why the search API is the core of the case

Many of the publisher lawsuits filed since 2023 have targeted the AI labs themselves. These two go after a supplier. Brave runs its own web index, which the complaint says holds more than 30 billion pages, with millions added each day. AI developers pay for access to it through the [Brave Search API](https://brave.com/search/api/?ref=venture-block.com), either to train models or to ground chatbot answers in live web content, a technique known as retrieval-augmented generation.

The publishers argue that this makes Brave the source the AI industry uses to reach news content it has not licensed. "AI giants are now desperate to avoid getting caught red-handed stealing news from publishers, so Brave Software is selling them a back door to the journalism they know they have no right to," Steven Lieberman of Rothwell, Figg, Ernst & Manbeck, the plaintiffs' lawyer, said in a statement [reported by TheWrap](https://www.thewrap.com/industry-news/tech/new-york-times-chicago-tribune-brave-ai-copyright-lawsuit/?ref=venture-block.com).

The Tribune complaint says the API can return far more than a snippet. In tests the papers describe, an API endpoint built for AI tools returned the full text of an Orlando Sentinel article, and a news-search endpoint returned nearly 350 words of a Daily News story verbatim. Ask Brave, the AI answer feature in Brave Search that replaced its earlier Summarizer in 2025, produced more than 1,200 words from a Chicago Tribune article on data-center tax breaks and nearly 600 words from a Daily News piece on Central Park horse carriages, according to the filing. These counts are the publishers' own figures.

## Paywalls, ad swaps and a hidden crawler

The suits also take aim at the Brave browser. It includes a filter list called "Paywall blocker," which the complaint says Brave promotes as a way to "Bypass Paywalls." That setting is the basis for a claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bars getting around technical measures that control access to copyrighted work. Ars Technica [tested the Mac browser](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/11/nyt-demands-brave-shut-down-its-paywall-blocker-and-end-deals-with-ai-firms/?ref=venture-block.com) and found the optional blocker let it read a paywalled Times article.

The papers also object to Brave blocking their ads and showing its own through the Brave Ads program, which underpins an unjust enrichment claim that the complaint says "does not depend on any copying." And they say Brave never identified its crawler, so they could not block it. Brave has explained that choice publicly: its [crawler help page](https://search.brave.com/help/brave-search-crawler?ref=venture-block.com) says the bot "does not advertise a differentiated user agent" to avoid being shut out by sites that only allow Google, and that it will not crawl pages Googlebot cannot reach.

In total the Tribune papers bring five counts: direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, the DMCA circumvention claim, and unjust enrichment under New York law. They seek statutory and actual damages, a share of Brave's profits and a permanent injunction, and they ask for a jury trial. The complaint names no dollar figure, but it alleges that Brave "has made more than $100 million" from publishers' work while the publishers received nothing.

## What the Times adds

The Times complaint makes the same core claims and adds a history of warnings. According to [TheWrap](https://www.thewrap.com/industry-news/tech/new-york-times-chicago-tribune-brave-ai-copyright-lawsuit/?ref=venture-block.com), the paper says it sent cease-and-desist letters to Brave chief executive Brendan Eich in August 2025 and April 2026 and got no reply. The Times "filed this lawsuit to hold Brave accountable for stealing our content to power its own products," spokesperson Graham James told [The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/tech/1024588/brave-lawsuit-ai-scraping-new-york-times?ref=venture-block.com).

Brave is not a small target. The Tribune complaint, citing Brave's own transparency data, says the browser had close to 130 million monthly users and more than 50 million daily users as of September 30, and that Brave Search handles more than 50 million queries a day. It also cites third-party reports that Brave's 2025 revenue topped $100 million, up from about $52 million in 2024.

## A wider fight over who pays for news in AI

The cases add a new front to a dispute that has mostly played out against model makers and answer engines. The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 and Perplexity in 2025\. Regulators are moving too: Turkey's competition authority [opened a probe into Google's AI Overviews](https://venture-block.com/turkey-google-ai-overviews-probe-interim-measures/) and ordered fairer terms for publishers. And the scrutiny of AI data sourcing comes as one of the named API customers, Anthropic, [works through its IPO filings](https://venture-block.com/anthropic-s1a-ai-accelerated-research-q3-revenue/).

Brave did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Ars Technica and TheWrap. It is already in a related case on the other coast: on May 19 it [sued News Corp and Dow Jones](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.470480/gov.uscourts.cand.470480.1.0%5F2.pdf?ref=venture-block.com) in federal court in California, asking a judge to declare that its indexing and Search API do not infringe their copyrights, and the News Corp side has filed counterclaims. Brave's next step in New York is to answer the two complaints.