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French artificial intelligence startup Mistral has signed a multi-thousand euro deal with Agence France-Presse to incorporate newswire articles into its chatbot, making the partnership a European bulwark against attacks on fact-checking from Silicon Valley rivals. It was marketed as. .
The partnership between AFP, one of the world’s oldest news agencies, and Mistral is the first of its kind for both Paris-based companies, with many media groups signing licensing deals with AI companies or We are in the process of deciding whether to take legal action due to suspicions. infringement.
The partnership, announced on Thursday, will feed more than 2,000 AFP news articles in six languages every day to Mistral’s chatbot, Le Chat, which allows users to answer questions and help draft documents. It will be.
Mistral co-founder and chief executive Arthur Mensch told the Financial Times: “It’s important to have agreements like this to ensure we have evidence-based information about verified content.” Ta.
The companies presented the deal as a way to ensure Mistral’s chatbot is based on verifiable information. This comes as Mehta and Elon Musk’s X have rolled back content moderation and declared the primacy of “free speech” in the run-up to the inauguration of US President-elect Donald Trump.
The deal with Mistral is also an opportunity for AFP to make up for lost revenue from the end of its fact-checking agreement with Meta © Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images
“What this report tells us is that Europe must come together to protect its thriving technology sector,” Mensch said of recent moves by Silicon Valley rivals. said.
“Freedom of speech is being used as a weapon against Europe to a large extent, with attacks by big tech companies against European regulation,” said Fabrice Vries, chief executive of AFP. told FT. “In the current climate, exactly this kind of deal shows that AI players are betting on independent, fact-based and professional journalism.”
On Wednesday, Google announced a similar deal with Associated Press, its longtime search engine partner, to display newswire feeds in its Gemini AI app.
Mistral raised €600 million in new funding at a €6 billion valuation in June last year, making it Europe’s most prominent AI company and building language models at scale to rival the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI. It became the only start-up company on the continent.
Mensch said Mistral offers a partnership model that is “more open” and “shares value more evenly” than its U.S. competitors.
AFP Director Fabrice Fries (right): “The only time I felt that it was a true partnership and not just a sales contract was with Mistral.” © Bruno Fert/FT
Frees said AFP has been in discussions with multiple AI companies about licensing deals in recent months, “but it was only with Mistral that we felt it was a true partnership and not just a distribution deal. ” he said.
Commercial terms of Mistral’s multi-year agreement with AFP were not disclosed. But unlike similar agreements struck between U.S.-based OpenAI and other media groups, this agreement is “not a one-time settlement” over the data on which large-scale language models are trained, Fries said. he said.
OpenAI has signed content deals with media groups including News Corp, Axel Springer, and the Financial Times. On Wednesday, the San Francisco-based group led by Sam Altman announced it would fund four new local newsrooms in the U.S. for online publisher Axios and feed the results into ChatGPT.
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Freeth said that dealing with AI companies “remains an open battle” and that he is closely following the U.S. lawsuit between OpenAI and the New York Times over alleged copyright infringement. From Publisher to AI Model Group.
For AFP, the deal with Mistral is also an opportunity to make up for lost revenue when the fact-checking deal with Meta ends.
The US social media group last week announced plans to move to community-based fact-checking in the US. Frees said AFP is sending 150 journalists to fact-check Meta.
AFP earned about 20 million euros in 2024 from its technology platforms, including fact-checking such as Meta and content licensing deals with platforms such as Google, accounting for about 10% of its commercial revenue last year.
“This revenue stream that has driven our growth and profitability for the past seven years is now clearly at risk,” Freese said. “There is a clear need to find new technology companies as a source of revenue, and AI actors could be a replacement for the platform.”
