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French artificial intelligence startup Mistral has struck a multimillion-dollar deal with Agence France-Presse to incorporate thousands of newswire articles into its chatbot, positioning the connection as a European bulwark against fact-checking attacks by its rivals in Silicon Valley. .
The partnership between AFP, one of the world’s oldest news agencies, and Mistral is the first of its kind for the two Paris-based companies at a time when many media groups are deciding whether to enter into licensing agreements with AI companies or take legal action for the claimed copyright. violation.
The deal, announced on Thursday, will feed more than 2,000 AFP news articles in six languages daily to Mistral’s chatbot, Le Chat, allowing users to answer questions and help draft of documents.
“It is important to have such agreements to have well-founded information on authenticated content,” Arthur Mensch, Mistral’s co-founder and chief executive, told the Financial Times.
The companies pitched the agreement as a means to ensure that Mistral’s chatbot is based on verifiable information. It comes after Elon Musk’s Meta and X backed away from content moderation and declared the primacy of “free speech” ahead of the inauguration of incoming US president Donald Trump.
“What it tells us is that Europe needs to come together to protect its thriving technology sector,” Mensch said of the latest moves by the Silicon Valley rivals.
“Free speech is being weaponized against Europe in a big way and there is such an offensive by Big Tech on European regulation,” AFP chief executive Fabrice Fries told the FT. “It is exactly this kind of deal, in the current context, shows that an AI player has bet on independent, fact-based, professional journalism.”
On Wednesday, Google announced a similar deal with the Associated Press, a longtime partner in its search engine, to feature the news feed in its Gemini AI app.
Mistral raised €600m in new funding at a €6bn valuation in June last year, making it Europe’s most prominent AI company and the only start-up on the continent to produce large language models rivaling the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI.
Mensch said Mistral offered a partnership model that was “more open” and “shares value more evenly” than its American competitors.
Fries said AFP had discussed licensing deals with several AI companies in recent months, “but only with Mistral did we feel like it was a real partnership, not just a sales deal.”
The commercial terms of Mistral and AFP’s multi-year deal were not disclosed. But unlike similar deals reached between US-based OpenAI and other media groups, Fries said the deal was not “a one-time solution” for the data on which large language models are trained.
OpenAI has reached 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 said it will fund four new local US newsrooms for online publisher Axios, with the exit to ChatGPT.
Fries said the deal with the AI companies was “still an open battle” and that he was closely following the US legal case between OpenAI and the New York Times over claims of copyright infringement, which will provide a new precedent on the value of work by publishers in AI model groups.
For the AFP, the deal with Mistral also represents an opportunity to offset the revenue it will lose once its fact-checking contract with Meta ends.
The US social media group said last week it planned to switch to community-based fact-checking in the US. AFP has 150 journalists working for Meta to verify facts, according to Fries.
AFP earned around €20m in 2024 from technology platforms, including fact-checking for the likes of Meta, and content licensing deals with platforms including Google, making up around 10 per cent of its commercial revenue last year .
“Now it’s clear that this pocket of revenue that has helped us grow and show profits for the past seven years is at risk,” Fries said. “We need to find new technology players as a source of revenue, and AI players can be a replacement for platforms.”
