The Wikimedia Foundation filed an amicus brief in The New York Times’ copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft, asking the court to apply fair use narrowly instead of ruling wholly for either side. The nonprofit behind Wikipedia argues that AI training should count as fair use when the resulting model is new and different from its sources, and that retrieval-augmented generation, where a model looks things up in outside sources to answer, should too, unless it repeats articles without credit. Wikimedia warned that a ruling against fair use could choke off open-source AI, while blanket approval could dry up the secondary sources that sites like Wikipedia are built from.
