Mistral signs AFP contract for fact-based chatbot in exchange for ‘free speech’ rivals.
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French artificial intelligence startup Mistral has struck a multimillion-euro deal with Agence France-Presse to integrate thousands of the news agency’s articles into its chatbot, casting the company as a European bulwark against attacks from its Silicon Valley counterparts -Competitors on fact checking.
The partnership between AFP, one of the world’s oldest news outlets, and Mistral is the first of its kind for the two Paris-based companies as many media conglomerates decide whether to enter into licensing deals with AI companies or take legal action over alleged copyright infringement .
The deal announced Thursday will feed more than 2,000 people AFP Every day, news articles in six languages
“Such agreements are important to have solid information about validated content,” Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral, told the Financial Times.
The companies presented the deal as a means to ensure Mistral’s chatbot is based on verifiable information. It comes as Meta and Elon Musk’s X have withdrawn content moderation and declared the primacy of “freedom of expression”in the run-up to the inauguration of the new US President Donald Trump.
“It shows us that Europe must unite to defend its thriving tech sector,” Mensch said of recent moves by Silicon Valley rivals.
“’Free speech’ is widely used as a weapon against Europe and there is this offensive by Big Tech European regulation“AFP chief Fabrice Fries told the FT. “A deal like this in particular shows in the current context that an AI actor has relied on independent, fact-based professional journalism.”
On Wednesday, Google announced a similar deal with the Associated Press, a longtime partner of its search engine, to display the newswire feed in its Gemini AI app.
Mistral has raised 600 million euros new financing Valued at €6 billion as of June last year, it is Europe’s most significant AI company and the only startup on the continent making large language models that can compete with OpenAI, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI.
Mensch said Mistral offered a partnership model that was “more open” and “shared value more evenly” than its U.S. competitors.
Fries said AFP had spoken to several about licensing agreements AI “But only with Mistral did we feel like it was a real partnership and not just a sales contract.”
Commercial terms of the multi-year deal between Mistral and AFP were not disclosed. But unlike similar agreements between U.S.-based OpenAI and other media groups, the deal is “not a one-off agreement” for data on which large language models are trained, Fries said.
OpenAI has signed content deals with media companies such as News Corp, Axel Springer and the Financial Times. On Wednesday, the San Francisco-based group led by Sam Altman announced it would fund four new local U.S. newsrooms for online publisher Axios and feed their results into ChatGPT.
Fries said dealing with AI companies is “still an open battle” and he is closely following the US legal case between OpenAI and the New York Times over copyright infringement claims, which is expected to provide a new precedent for the value of the work of publishers on AI -Model groups.
For AFP, the deal with Mistral also represents an opportunity to offset revenue lost due to the expiration of its fact-checking contract with Meta.
The US social media group announced last week that it planned to move to community-based fact-checking in the US. According to Fries, AFP employs 150 journalists who work on fact-checking for Meta.
AFP earned about 20 million euros from technology platforms in 2024, including fact-checking meta and content licensing deals with platforms such as Google, which accounted for about 10 percent of its commercial revenue last year.
“Now this revenue stream that has helped us grow and make profits over the last seven years is clearly in jeopardy,” Fries said. “We clearly need to find new technology providers as a source of revenue, and AI players can be a replacement for the platforms.”
