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French artificial intelligence startup Mistral has struck a multimillion-dollar deal with Agence France-Presse to feed thousands of newswire articles into its chatbot, positioning itself as a European bulwark against attacks on fact-checking by Silicon Valley rivals. .
The partnership between AFP, one of the world's oldest news agencies, and Mistral is the first of its kind for the two Parisian companies as many media groups decide whether to enter into licensing agreements with AI companies or take legal action over alleged copyrights. violation.
The deal, announced Thursday, will benefit more than 2,000 AFP news articles in six languages every day to Mistral's chatbot, Le Chat, allowing users to answer questions and help draft documents.
“It's important to have agreements like this so that we have well-founded information about verified content,” Arthur Mensch, co-founder and chief executive of Mistral, told the Financial Times.
The companies pitched the agreement as a means to ensure that Mistral's chatbot is based on verifiable information. It comes as Meta and Elon Musk's X stepped back from content moderation and declared the primacy “freedom of speech”in the run-up to the inauguration of incoming US President Donald Trump.
“What it tells us is that Europe needs to unite to defend its booming technology sector,” Mensch said of the recent moves by Silicon Valley rivals.
“Freedom of speech” is largely being used as a weapon against Europe and this Big Tech offensive continues European regulationAFP Director General Fabrice Fries told the FT. “Exactly this kind of business in the current context shows that the AI player has bet on independent, professional journalism based on facts.”
On Wednesday, Google announced a similar deal with the Associated Press, a longtime search engine partner, to display a newswire feed in its Gemini AI app.
Mistral raised €600 million new funding with a valuation of €6 billion in June last year, making it Europe's most prominent AI company and the only start-up on the continent to produce large language models that rival OpenAI, Anthropic and Elon Musk's xAI.
Mensch said Mistral offered a partnership model that was “more open” and “shared value more evenly” than its US competitors.
Fries said AFP has negotiated licensing deals with several AI company in recent months, “but only with Mistral did we feel it was a real partnership, not just a sales contract.”
The commercial terms of the Mistral-AFP deal, which has been going on for several years, were not disclosed. But unlike similar deals struck between US-based OpenAI and other media groups, Fries said the agreement is “not a one-time deal” for the data on which large language models are trained.
OpenAI has entered into content deals with media groups including News Corp, Axel Springer and Financial Times. On Wednesday, the San Francisco-based group led by Sam Altman said it would fund four new local US newsrooms for online publisher Axios, with output fed to ChatGPT.
Fries said that dealing with AI companies was “still an open battle” and that he was closely following the US legal case between OpenAI and the New York Times over claims of copyright infringement, which is expected to set a new precedent for the value of the work. publishers to AI model groups.
For the AFP, the deal with Mistral also represents an opportunity to replace the revenue it will lose as its fact-checking contract with Meta ends.
The US social media group said last week it plans to switch to community-based fact-checking in the US. According to Fries, AFP has 150 journalists who do fact-checking for Met.
AFP earned about 20 million euros in 2024 from technology platforms, including fact-checking such as Meta and content licensing agreements with platforms including Google, which accounted for about 10 percent of its commercial revenue last year.
“Now it's clear that this pocket of revenue that has helped us grow and turn a profit for the past seven years is at risk,” Fries said. “We clearly need to find new technology players as a source of revenue, and AI actors can be a replacement for platforms.”
