The New York Times and three newspapers sue Brave over AI answers and ad blocking

On November 2, 2026, The New York Times, together with the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, separately sued Brave Software in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that it included newspaper content in its search index and sold it to AI companies, reproduced paywalled articles through Ask Brave's AI answers, and used the browser's paywall-blocking feature to bypass subscriptions and replace ads. Each case lists five claims, including direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, DMCA circumvention, and unjust enrichment under New York state law. The complaints state that the LLM Context interface once returned 1291 of the 1295 words of a Times article verbatim, and that Ask Brave reproduced a Chicago Tribune article of more than 1200 words. The New York Times states that it sent letters demanding that the conduct stop on August 11, 2025 and April 13, 2026; Brave has not yet responded in court. Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere are listed as API customers but are not defendants.