A coalition of newspapers has brought a federal suit against the maker of the Brave web browser, accusing the company of unlawfully harvesting copyrighted articles to feed artificial-intelligence systems and of facilitating the circumvention of news paywalls, Reuters reported on November 2, 2026. The complaint was filed on behalf of the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, and references additional claims by The New York Times and other publishers.
According to the filing, Brave monetizes an internal ‘Brave Index’ that aggregates scraped web pages and sells real-time access to AI developers. The suit alleges that companies such as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere have received ‘stolen copyrighted content’ from the index to train models or to generate answers to user queries.
Brave also markets a ‘Paywall blocker’ feature that it says lets users view articles from ‘hundreds of top publishers’ without encountering subscription prompts. The complaint contends that this tool directly undermines the revenue models of the newspapers involved, allowing readers to bypass the digital barriers that fund newsroom operations.
Requests for comment were sent to Brave, Anthropic, Mistral, xAI and Cohere, but none of the firms responded before publication. Perplexity’s chief communications officer, Jesse Dwyer, dismissed the lawsuit as a financial tactic, stating, “The New York Times is overpaying its attorneys and underpaying its journalists,” a remark reported by The Verge.
An update to the story clarified that the lawsuit was filed by the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, not by the corporate owners of those titles, and added a statement from the attorney who represents the three papers. The attorney’s filing reiterates the claim that Brave’s practices infringe on the publishers’ exclusive rights to their content.
The case joins a growing wave of litigation in which legacy media outlets seek to curb the use of their copyrighted material for training large language models. Industry observers note that similar suits have been filed against other tech platforms, reflecting heightened tension between publishers’ desire to protect revenue and AI developers’ demand for vast text corpora.