The supplier, not the model builder
The New York Times Company sued Brave Software in the Southern District of New York on 2 November, in a 72-page complaint that goes after the search index behind a browser rather than a model. Brave, it says, is “the supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content for its own users and many of the most prominent GenAI companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.” None of those five is a defendant.
A second complaint was filed the same day by Daily News, LP, the Chicago Tribune Company and Orlando Sentinel Communications. Both are brought by Rothwell, Figg, Ernst & Manbeck, demand a jury trial, and plead the same five counts: direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act under sections 1201(a)(1)(A) and 1201(a)(2), and unjust enrichment under New York law.
What the complaint points at
Two Brave products are central. The Brave Search API’s “LLM Context” endpoint, the Times says, gives AI customers direct access to the websites in Brave’s index, including paywalled journalism. Separately, a browser setting the complaint identifies as “Paywall blocker” is promoted by Brave, in the complaint’s quotation of its own marketing, as allowing users to “Bypass Paywalls.”
The filing also puts Brave’s own staff in evidence. A Brave employee, it alleges, posted instructions on X for using the browser to circumvent the Times’s paywall and tagged several colleagues including Luke Mulks, Brave’s VP of Business Operations; another employee replied suggesting users “just enable the paywall list in Brave filters” to “remove the nag.”
On money, the complaint states that “Brave has made more than $100 million by copying and reselling publishers’ work without consent or permission,” while “publishers have received nothing.” It cites third-party reports that Brave’s 2025 revenue passed $100 million, up from about $52 million in 2024, and says that as of 30 September 2026 the browser had close to 130 million monthly users, with Brave Search answering more than 50 million queries a day — a third of which, it says, lead to an AI-generated response.
Two years of letters first
The Times says its outside counsel wrote to Brave chief executive Brendan Eich on 11 August 2025 demanding that unauthorised access and use stop, and sent a second letter on 13 April 2026. It claims it owns over 10 million registered copyrighted works. Brave has defended its search practices as fair use in the past; it has not answered either complaint, and had issued no public response on the day of filing.
What to watch
The suits widen the copyright fight from model developers to the intermediaries that feed them. Brave is already in litigation with News Corp, which countersued in July after Brave sought a declaration that its search practices were lawful. The first real signal here will be Brave’s answer, and whether it defends the index and the paywall blocker on the same grounds.
