Wikipedia Enters OpenAI Copyright Showdown With A Warning About The Future Of The Web

The Wikimedia Foundation filed an amicus brief Friday in federal court, urging the Southern District of New York to balance AI innovation with protecting the online information ecosystem.

In a post announcing the filing, the nonprofit foundation, known for its online encyclopedia directory, said it wants to protect the knowledge-sharing model that supports Wikipedia and other open-information projects.

"We are taking a position in this case to defend the free and open human knowledge that Wikipedia depends on. Expanding access to knowledge through AI is a powerful goal, but it must respect the people, contributors, and communities that make reliable knowledge possible. Finding this balance is both a mutual benefit and a shared responsibility for the entire information ecosystem," CEO Bernadette Meehan said.

How To Distinguish?

The filing stems from The New York Times’ 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, which accused the companies of improperly using its copyrighted articles to develop and power AI systems. The companies have argued that using publicly available material to train large language models constitutes fair use.

The Wikimedia Foundation’s brief proposes distinguishing between AI model training and systems that retrieve and reproduce existing web content when generating responses.

It argued that training models on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use when the resulting models are meaningfully distinct from their source material, rather than reproducing the underlying works. Such an approach would allow AI development without requiring companies to negotiate licensing agreements for all training data.

However, the foundation drew a different line for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and similar technologies that pull current information from websites to ground chatbot responses. In those cases, companies should not automatically assume their use qualifies as fair use and should respect publishers’ licensing requirements, the brief argued.

Wikipedia Counsel: It’s Not Just A ‘For-Profit’ Conversation

AI models use Wikipedia’s content to train. The foundation highlighted its Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 licensing terms, which require attribution and share-alike treatment for adaptations.

"Any conversation around fair use and copyright in the age of AI cannot be limited to for-profit organizations: it must include stakeholders across the entire online information ecosystem," General Counsel Stephen LaPorte said.

The foundation also emphasized that companies accessing its projects should follow responsible-use practices, including complying with public API rate limits or using its enterprise API offerings.

Wikipedia contains more than 67 million articles in roughly 300 languages and receives contributions from about 250,000 volunteers each month, making it a major source of information for AI developers. The foundation’s filing argues that protecting the incentives and infrastructure behind open knowledge is essential not only for Wikipedia but for the broader web.

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