The New York Times sues Brave Software over AI search answers, its search API, and a paywall bypass setting

The complaint

The New York Times Company v. Brave Software, Inc., No. 1:26-cv-09549 (S.D.N.Y.), is a 72-page complaint dated and filed November 2, 2026, ECF No. 1, with a jury demand. The Times describes itself as a New York corporation headquartered in New York, and describes Brave as a closely held Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in San Francisco, California. The Times alleges it owns over 10 million registered, copyrighted works, including those listed in Exhibit A to the complaint.

What it alleges about Brave's products

The complaint alleges that Brave built a search index by crawling and copying billions of websites without identifying its crawler, which it says left website owners with no way to block it. It alleges that Brave then added Ask Brave, an AI feature that answers queries by passing content from the index to a large language model through retrieval augmented generation, with answers that the complaint says often include verbatim text from, and detailed summaries of, copyrighted articles.

It alleges that Brave sells access to the same index to other AI companies through the Brave Search API, which those companies use to train their models, to answer user queries, or both, and that Brave promotes a news index and an LLM Context endpoint for that purpose. It also alleges that the Brave Browser has a setting called Paywall blocker, promoted as letting users bypass paywalls, and that the browser's built-in ad blocking removes ads from publishers' sites and shows Brave's own ads instead.

The Times alleges it never gave Brave permission to use its content for AI purposes. It says it sent Brave's chief executive a letter on August 11, 2025, demanding that Brave stop accessing and using Times content, and that its outside counsel sent a second letter on April 13, 2026, and it alleges that Brave did not respond to either.

The five counts

Count I pleads direct copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501. It alleges, on information and belief, that Brave willfully copied as many Times articles as it could reach with its own or third parties' web crawlers into indexes used for retrieval augmented generation, and that Brave's answers, its API sales, and the browser's access to paywalled articles each infringe the exclusive rights in 17 U.S.C. § 106. It cites Brave's failure to respond to the letters, the paywall bypass setting, and Brave's refusal to name its crawler as signs of willfulness.

Count II pleads contributory infringement, alleging that Brave induced infringement by its users and by AI companies that use its index and provided services specifically tailored to it. Count III pleads vicarious infringement, alleging that Brave controls the products involved and collects a fee on every API response. Count IV pleads violations of 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(A) and § 1201(a)(2), alleging that the Times paywalls and other technological measures control access to its works and that Brave circumvented them and trafficked in a tool, the paywall bypass setting, designed to do so; it seeks the remedies in 17 U.S.C. § 1203. Count V pleads unjust enrichment under New York law based only on Brave's replacement of Times advertising with its own ads, and the complaint says that count does not depend on any copying.

The Times asks for statutory damages, actual damages, restitution of profits, a permanent injunction, costs, expenses, and attorneys' fees, and other relief the court finds just.