TL;DR
- The complaint lists five claims against Brave Software: direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, a DMCA anti-circumvention claim, and unjust enrichment under New York law.
- Brave's crawler help page says the bot has no differentiated user agent and skips anything Googlebot cannot crawl; delisting requires noindex, which also removes the page from Google.
- The filing names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as Brave API customers; none is a defendant, and Brave had not responded as of 6 November 2026.
The New York Times Company sued Brave Software in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on 2 November 2026 (Civil Action No. 26-cv-9549). The complaint alleges that Brave built a search index of more than 30 billion webpages with a crawler that never identifies itself, then sold that content to AI companies through the Brave Search API. For website owners the practical point sits in Brave's own documentation: its crawler follows Googlebot's robots.txt rules and has no separate user agent, so a site cannot keep Brave out while letting Google in. These are allegations in a complaint, not court findings, and Brave had not responded publicly as of the reports this article draws on.
What The New York Times filed on 2 November 2026
The 72-page complaint published by The New York Times Company names Brave Software, Inc., a Delaware corporation based in San Francisco, as the only defendant. The Times is represented by the law firm Rothwell, Figg, Ernst & Manbeck and has demanded a jury trial. The filing is dated 2 November 2026.
The complaint sets out five claims. Count I is direct copyright infringement. Count II is contributory copyright infringement. Count III is vicarious copyright infringement. Count IV alleges violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, specifically the anti-circumvention provisions in 17 U.S.C. section 1201. Count V is unjust enrichment under New York law, tied to the claim that Brave blocks the ads on Times pages and shows its own instead. The Times asks for statutory and actual damages, restitution of profits, legal costs and a permanent injunction.
The Times says it owns more than 10 million registered copyrighted works and had more than 13 million paying subscribers as of 30 June 2026. According to the complaint, its intellectual property counsel wrote to Brave chief executive Brendan Eich on 11 August 2025 demanding that Brave stop using Times content, and outside counsel sent a second letter on 13 April 2026. The complaint says Brave ignored both.
The Brave Index and the crawler with no name
The core of the case is what the complaint calls the Brave Index. Quoting Brave's own AI page, the filing says the index holds "over 30 billion webpages, with millions of new pages indexed each day." The Times alleges that Brave compiled it by crawling and copying those pages "without identifying itself or providing website owners with any mechanism to block its crawler."
Brave's help page for its search crawler, which the complaint cites, explains the design from Brave's side. The page says the Brave Search crawler does not advertise a differentiated user agent because Brave must avoid discrimination from websites that allow only Google to crawl them. It adds that if a domain or page is not crawlable by Googlebot, Brave's bot will not crawl it either. The same page says robots.txt is not used to prevent a page from being indexed, and that a site owner who wants a page delisted should use the robots noindex directive, after which Brave has to re-fetch the page before the change takes effect. Brave also states that its crawler is partly powered by data from users who opt in to its Web Discovery Project in the Brave browser.
Put those statements together and the consequence for a site owner is plain. Robots.txt works by naming crawlers. You can allow Googlebot and disallow GPTBot, for example, because each one announces itself. Brave's crawler does not have a name of its own to put in that file, and it obeys whatever Googlebot is told. Search Engine Journal spelled this out in a 6 November 2026 analysis: the noindex tag that removes a page from Brave also tells Google to drop it. In practice the only choices are to be in both indexes or in neither.
The Times treats this as evidence of intent. In Count I it lists Brave's "refusal to release the name of its web crawler bot" as one reason the alleged infringement was willful, and in Count II it says Brave made it impossible for content owners to block its bots.
How Brave turned the index into AI products
According to the complaint, Brave made little headway in search, and by 2023 it began to monetize the index in two ways. The first is inside Brave Search. A feature called Summarizer launched in 2023 and was updated and renamed Ask Brave in 2025. It uses retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which Brave calls "AI Grounding", to answer queries directly with summaries of, and sometimes verbatim text from, indexed pages. The complaint says Brave Search answers more than 50 million queries a day and that a third of them lead to an AI-generated response. In one example in the filing, Ask Brave was given only the URL of a paywalled Times article and, when asked, output more than 400 words of that article verbatim.
The second route is the Brave Search API, sold mainly to companies. The complaint quotes a 2023 Brave guide saying the API's "most common uses today are in training and grounding" large language models. It describes several API endpoints:
- Web Search, which returns results plus five additional excerpts per result.
- News Search, described by Brave as a specialized index of articles from trusted outlets, also with additional excerpts.
- LLM Context, which Brave says returns "extracted page chunks and source metadata" sized for an LLM "without need for further scraping."
- Answers, which the complaint says is the same service that powers Ask Brave.
The complaint cites a February 2026 Brave blog post saying the API handles billions of calls each week. It also cites third-party reports that Brave's 2025 revenue passed $100 million, up from about $52 million in 2024. The Times further alleges that the Brave browser includes a "Paywall blocker" setting that Brave promotes as a way to "Bypass Paywalls," which is the basis of the DMCA claim.
The AI companies named in the filing
The opening paragraph of the complaint describes Brave as a supplier to "many of the most prominent GenAI companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere." None of these companies is a defendant. For support, the filing points to Brave's About page, which says the API is used by Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity and You.com, and to a 2 November 2023 Brave blog post stating that Anthropic used the Brave Search API to train Claude 2 and optimize its outputs for RAG queries. The complaint also cites Meta's Llama 3 paper, which describes training the model to use the Brave API for questions about recent events.
Search Engine Journal noted that the Anthropic evidence in the complaint dates from 2023 and that its author could not confirm whether Claude still uses Brave today. The same article reported, citing TechCrunch, that Anthropic added Brave Search to its list of subprocessors in March 2025.
Key facts from the complaint at a glance
The table below collects the main facts stated in the filing and in Brave's crawler help page, with the source of each.
| Item | What the source says | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Case | The New York Times Company v. Brave Software, Inc., No. 26-cv-9549, SDNY, filed 2 November 2026, jury trial demanded | Complaint |
| Brave Index size | Over 30 billion webpages, with millions of new pages indexed each day (Brave's own figure) | Complaint, quoting Brave |
| Crawler identity | No differentiated user agent; does not crawl what Googlebot cannot crawl | Brave crawler help page |
| Opting out | robots.txt does not prevent indexing; use noindex, then Brave must re-fetch the page | Brave crawler help page |
| Claims | Direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement; DMCA anti-circumvention; unjust enrichment under New York law | Complaint |
What else is happening around Brave
Search Engine Journal reported on 6 November 2026 that the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel filed a separate case against Brave on the same day as The Times. It also reported, citing Semafor, that News Corp sued Brave in July 2026, alleging that Brave hides its crawlers so publishers cannot detect or block them, after Brave had sued News Corp first in response to a cease-and-desist letter. In that earlier dispute Brave argued that it was only indexing the web, which it described as something all search engine operators must do to exist. Brave had not answered the Times complaint when Search Engine Journal published.
What the complaint does not establish
A complaint is one side's account. Nothing in it has been tested in court, and Brave has not yet filed a response, so its defenses are unknown. The filing does not say how much Times content is in the Brave Index, beyond the examples it shows. It does not say which AI companies use the API today, or for what; its evidence on Anthropic and Meta comes from 2023 and 2024 documents. It says nothing about websites outside the United States, and nothing about Thailand. Whether courts treat indexing for AI grounding the same way they treat indexing for a search results page is the question the case may eventually answer, but no date for any ruling has been set.
Why this matters for GEO
For brands working on visibility in AI answers, the case is a reminder that AI assistants do not only read the web through their own named crawlers. Some of them query someone else's index. If an assistant grounds its answers through the Brave Search API, then whether your page can appear in that answer depends partly on whether Brave has indexed it, and on what Brave's stored copy of the page says.
That has three practical consequences. First, an AI-bot section in robots.txt does not cover Brave, because there is no Brave user agent to name. Second, the only documented way out of the Brave Index is noindex, which also removes the page from Google, so for nearly every business it is not a realistic option. Third, Search Engine Journal observed that Brave served a stored copy of a homepage description that had been changed earlier the same day, which suggests freshness in Brave's index can lag behind the live site. Pages that change prices, offers or contact details often are the ones most exposed to that lag. An AI-search plan built through generative engine optimization should treat Brave as one of the indexes worth checking, alongside Google and Bing.
What this means for Thai marketers
Thai businesses are not part of this lawsuit, and nothing in the complaint mentions Thailand. The mechanism still applies to any public website, because Brave's crawler follows Googlebot's permissions everywhere. A few checks are worth doing now:
- Search Engine Journal suggests typing site: followed by your domain into search.brave.com. Whatever appears is in the Brave Index.
- Compare what Brave shows for your key pages, in both Thai and English, with the live versions. Outdated titles or descriptions there may be what an AI tool grounded on Brave reads.
- Review your robots.txt rules for AI crawlers knowing that they do not reach Brave. If your goal is to be cited by AI assistants, that is probably fine; if your goal is to keep content out of AI tools, robots.txt alone will not do it.
- Keep core technical SEO healthy for Googlebot, since Brave's crawler inherits Googlebot's access to your site.
Publishers with paywalled or licensed content in Thailand have a separate question, which is whether they want their work in any third-party index sold to AI firms. The case will be worth following for that reason, but for now no court has said what Brave may or may not do.
Frequently asked questions
Can I block Brave's crawler in robots.txt?
No, not separately from Google. Brave's help page says its crawler does not advertise its own user agent and follows the robots.txt directives set for Googlebot, so there is no Brave-specific user agent to target in robots.txt.
How do I remove my pages from the Brave Index?
Brave says to use the robots noindex directive and then have Brave re-fetch the page. Search Engine Journal points out that the same tag tells Google to drop the page, so this removes it from Google too.
Is Anthropic being sued?
No, Anthropic is not a defendant. The complaint names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as Brave API customers, but the only defendant is Brave Software, Inc.
Has Brave responded to the lawsuit?
Not as of the reports used here. Search Engine Journal said on 6 November 2026 that Brave had not responded, and the complaint itself says Brave ignored two earlier letters from The Times.
Does this affect websites in Thailand?
The lawsuit does not, because it concerns The Times's content in a US court. The crawler behavior described on Brave's help page applies to any public site, including Thai ones, so the same robots.txt limits apply.
If you want to know how your brand appears in AI answers, and which indexes those answers draw on, Relevant Audience can review your site's AI visibility alongside your search setup.
