Allegations span AI search and content distribution
The three publishers allege that Brave plays a "central role" in supplying their content to users and AI companies, naming Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere, according to MLex. Their complaint says Brave "acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content to third parties." It describes those third parties as "the knowing receivers of that stolen content, which they have used to build their trillion dollar businesses."
Among the examples in the complaint are responses from the company's AI search tool, Ask Brave. TheWrap reported that the publishers allege the tool generated more than 1,200 words from Chicago Tribune reporting on tax breaks for data centers and nearly 600 words from a Daily News article on Central Park horse carriages.
The complaints also point to Brave's descriptions of its Search API. Its marketing identifies the API's most common uses as "in training and grounding several of the Web's biggest large language models." The publishers also cite a Brave blog post saying Anthropic used the API to train Claude 2.
Five claims and a request for damages
The three newspapers assert five claims, The Next Web reported: direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement; circumvention of technical protections under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; and unjust enrichment under New York law.
The Alden-owned publications say the alleged conduct affects more than two million registered articles. They have requested a jury trial and seek statutory and actual damages, repayment of profits and a permanent injunction.
Both their case and the Times' lawsuit were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The Times case is No. 1:26-cv-09549, and the three-publisher case is No. 1:26-cv-09554. Rothwell, Figg, Ernst & Manbeck filed both complaints, with attorney Steven Lieberman signing. The Times' filing is 72 pages; the other complaint is 69 pages.
The Times alleges that it had already asked Brave to stop: its complaint says cease-and-desist letters sent to CEO Brendan Eich in August 2025 and April 2026 went unanswered.
Publishers challenge the revenue model
The publishers' objections extend to advertising. Brave's browser blocks publishers' ads by default, while the company can sell advertising of its own. The three newspapers argue that this arrangement allows Brave to earn money from their journalism without sharing that revenue with them.
They also cite a study that found AI crawlers generated 95.7% less referral traffic than traditional Google search. The newspapers say that reduced traffic limits their opportunities to earn advertising and subscription revenue from their reporting.
According to the newspapers' complaint, Brave reported revenue exceeding $100 million in 2025 and has about 130 million monthly users. The company was founded in 2015 and has raised roughly $250 million to date, according to private-market trackers cited by TechCrunch.
Earlier dispute with News Corp
Brave's web indexing was already the subject of litigation before these filings. In March 2025, the company sued News Corp for a declaration that its indexing constituted fair use. News Corp countersued in July 2026, alleging that Brave scraped copyrighted journalism and resold it to AI developers.
