# New York Times sues Brave over 30 billion webpages sold to AI companies

Digest AI · Policy & Regulation · published 2026-11-06T20:00:19Z

Canonical: https://digestai.news/story/new-york-times-sues-brave-over-30-billion-webpages-sold-to-ai-companie

## Summary

The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Brave on November 2, alleging the company copied more than 30 billion webpages without identifying its crawler or giving site owners a way to block it, then sold that content to AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere. Brave sells access to its search index through the Brave Search API, which its About page says is used by Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity, and You.com. The Times also claims copyright infringement and paywall circumvention. Brave has not yet responded to the suit.

Brave's help page states its crawler "does not advertise a differentiated user agent," meaning it has no unique name in robots.txt. Brave says it follows Googlebot's permissions, so sites cannot allow Google while blocking Brave. The only opt-out Brave offers is the noindex tag, which also removes pages from Google. A separate case was filed the same day by the Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel. In July 2026, News Corp sued Brave over similar crawler concealment claims, per Semafor.

## Key points

- NYT alleges Brave copied 30+ billion pages without a named crawler or opt-out mechanism
- Brave Search API sells index access to Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, Cohere
- Brave's crawler follows Googlebot rules; sites must use noindex to opt out, losing Google too

## Why it matters

The case tests whether search indexes can be sold to AI firms without publisher consent or crawler transparency, affecting every site in Brave's 30B-page index.

## Sources

1. [Brave Sells Its Search Index To AI, And Your Website Is Probably In It via @sejournal, @slobodanmanic](https://searchenginejournal.com/brave-sells-its-search-index-to-ai-and-your-website-is-probably-in-it/595829) (Search Engine Journal, 2026-11-06)

Part of the developing story: [Publishers vs Brave AI Content Scraping](https://digestai.news/thread/new-york-times-sues-brave-over-ai-scraping-and-paywall-bypass) (2 stories)

## Cite

Digest AI, "New York Times sues Brave over 30 billion webpages sold to AI companies", 6 November 2026, https://digestai.news/story/new-york-times-sues-brave-over-30-billion-webpages-sold-to-ai-companie

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