Wikimedia Weighs In on New York Times Lawsuit Against OpenAI

The Wikimedia Foundation has stepped into the copyright lawsuit brought by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft. In a legal brief, the organization urged the court to take a balanced approach, warning that an extreme position favoring either side could damage free knowledge and the open internet.

The Times argues that AI companies should not enjoy unlimited freedom to use its content. OpenAI and Microsoft counter that using published data to train models falls under fair use and supports technological progress.

A middle path

Wikimedia backed applying fair use in some AI training scenarios, particularly when models produce new results that differ from the original sources. At the same time, it cautioned that giving companies broad freedom to reuse content could shrink the pool of information sources available online.

The foundation also addressed retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). It described the technique as valuable for improving AI answers by drawing on reliable knowledge bases, but said it does not support using it to reproduce entire articles without crediting their source.

Why it matters

Wikimedia said the coming ruling could set an important legal precedent. More than ten similar cases are pending over the use of content to train AI technologies, so the outcome could influence both innovation and access to knowledge.

For readers, the dispute goes beyond two companies and a newspaper. How courts draw the line between training, retrieval and reproduction may shape which sources remain open, how AI tools cite them, and whether publishers keep an incentive to publish freely online.