This article was originally posted on Diff on October 30, 2026. A shorter version was posted on the Wikimedia Foundation News on the same date. CC-BY SA 4.0

Bernadette Meehan, CEO of the WMF, sent the following note to The Signpost for our readers and all Wikipedia editors.

Human-created knowledge is the foundation that makes AI useful to people. Wikipedia volunteers built that foundation and expand it every day by collaborating, sourcing, and sharing reliable information freely with the world. Your efforts put you, and the Wikimedia movement, at the heart of the future of knowledge, which everyone has a responsibility to protect.

–S

The Wikimedia Foundation has filed an amicus brief, a "friend of the court" submission, with the Southern District Court of New York in In re: OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, a major copyright case involving OpenAI and Microsoft. The Foundation’s goal is to help protect the open, accessible knowledge that Wikipedia, and millions of people, depend on.

The case brings together 12 lawsuits, the most well-known of them being The New York Times v. Microsoft and OpenAI. At its heart is an important question: When AI companies use copyrighted information does it qualify as fair use?

For the Wikimedia Foundation, the answer needs to leave room for innovation while supporting the people and organizations that make access to knowledge possible, including Wikimedia volunteers. The Foundation is not taking the side of either OpenAI or The New York Times in this case. It is asking the court to protect open knowledge, something that matters to everyone who uses the internet.

More than 67 million Wikipedia articles, across 300 languages, are built and improved by nearly 250,000 volunteer editors. This work relies on access to trustworthy sources, including journalism, and other published research.

AI systems, in turn, rely on Wikipedia. It is one of the largest and most high-quality datasets for large language models, in addition to powering search engines and voice assistants.

A copyright ruling that disrupts either side of that relationship could affect how everyone finds and uses information.

The New York Times filed its lawsuit in 2023, arguing that OpenAI and Microsoft used its copyrighted content without permission. OpenAI and Microsoft argue that using publicly available material to develop their AI systems qualifies as fair use.

Fair use allows certain uses of copyrighted material without the copyright holder’s permission. The question here is how it should apply to AI.

The Wikimedia Foundation sees risks in overly broad answers in either direction.

A ruling that interprets fair use too restrictively could make it more difficult to access publicly available content that is critical to developing open source AI technologies that benefit everyone. It would also inhibit many valuable ways that people gather and share public knowledge online.

The New York Times and other publishers argue that the way AI companies have acquired copyrighted works for training AI, use those copyrighted works to train AI, and later use those copyrighted works in their consumer services to answer people’s questions should not be considered fair use. OpenAI is arguing that all of the ways that they use copyrighted works to develop and operate their LLM systems should be considered fair.

Our arguments focus on preserving an appropriate place for fair use in the process, while protecting copyrighted content when it can be replaced by AI. If the training step is not considered fair use, AI technology development would likely only become possible for either the largest corporations who can afford to pay for the content, or the most well-funded developers who can purchase their proprietary models. Many open-source developers would be unable to afford or even access the technology.

This outcome would directly harm the ability for Wikimedia volunteers to access relevant knowledge and to build and experiment with new open-source technologies which help them add, maintain, and improve the knowledge on Wikipedia.

But a ruling that gives AI companies a blanket right to avoid existing copyright rules and license requirements would encourage publishers to lock more information behind barriers. That would leave fewer sources available to the volunteers who build Wikipedia.

If courts agree with this blanket interpretation of fair use, AI developers would no longer be beholden to existing copyright licensing terms that require proper attribution and additional licensing terms that underpin open human knowledge online and support the communities that produce it.

This outcome would harm open knowledge and Wikimedia projects by further reducing visibility that we, and many publishers, depend on for readership and to attract the new volunteers that sustain our projects.

The Foundation’s position is straightforward: the court should consider how material is being used, rather than treat every AI use as the same.

The Foundation’s brief draws an important distinction between training an AI model and using source material to answer a particular question.

During training, an AI model learns patterns from large collections of material. The Foundation argues that using copyrighted works for this purpose may qualify as fair use when the resulting model is something new and different from those works.

Answering a user’s question with retrieved material is different. Some chatbots search for information and use what they find to build a response. One such approach is called retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG. These techniques help connect an answer to outside sources rather than relying only on what a model learned during training.

The Foundation argues that when AI products retrieve and reproduce copyrighted content this way, they should respect the source’s licensing requirements rather than treat the use as fair.

Wikipedia’s content is available for others to use; we want free knowledge to thrive. That openness is central to its mission, but it does not mean there are no conditions.

Wikipedia uses the Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 license. It requires credit to the original creators and requires adaptations to remain available under the same license.

The Foundation argues that AI companies using Wikipedia content through RAG or similar techniques must honor those requirements. Giving credit preserves a connection between the information people receive and the contributors who made it available.

Collecting content should not put an unsustainable burden on the systems that keep Wikipedia running. Regardless of whether companies are gathering material for training or retrieving it for answers, they must respect its public API rate limits or use its Wikimedia Enterprise API offerings.

This case is about more than who wins a dispute between publishers and technology companies. The question at the heart of this case can affect whether the next generation of information tools will help sustain the human work they’re built on.

The Foundation is advocating for a balanced position that considers each stage of use when considering AI technology. This will protect fair use that enables valuable new technologies, while respecting the rights of people, publishers, and communities that make reliable knowledge possible.

For everyone who has ever turned to Wikipedia to understand the world, that balance matters.

To read more about the details of our legal argument, see the post on our Policy on Medium. You can also review the amicus brief in its entirety on Commons.

We thank Angela Chung, WMF’s Tech Law and Policy Fellow for her support in drafting, Rossella Gabriele, Fellow-in-Residence at Yale Law School Information Society Project (ISP) for her support in research and editing, and Rhett Millsaps of Lex Lumina LLP for his support in the filing process.