Wikimedia Foundation warns AI copyright ruling could threaten open web

The nonprofit behind Wikipedia wants courts to protect AI training on copyrighted work while drawing a hard line at chatbots that regurgitate it The Wikimedia Foundation has entered the biggest AI copyright fight in the US, and it is not picking a team. In an amicus brief filed Friday, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia asked courts to take a middle path. Training large language models on copyrighted material should get legal protection, it argues. Chatbots spitting that material back out to users should not. That position puts Wikimedia in an unusual spot. It is effectively telling both The New York Times and OpenAI that they are each partly right. What Wikimedia is asking for The filing lands in In Re: OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, a consolidated case in the Southern District of New York under case number 1:25-md-03143. The suits pit publishers, The New York Times among them, against OpenAI and Microsoft. Wikimedia’s brief splits the AI pipeline into two distinct stages. The first is training, where a model ingests huge volumes of text to learn patterns in language. The second is output, where a chatbot answers a user’s question. On training, the Foundation argues t...