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French artificial intelligence start-up Mistral has struck a multimillion-euro deal with Agence France-Presse to incorporate thousands of the newswire’s articles into its chatbot, pitching the tie-up as a European bulwark against attacks on fact-checking from its Silicon Valley rivals.
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, when many media groups are deciding whether to strike licensing agreements with AI companies or take legal action over alleged copyright infringement.
The deal, announced on Thursday, will feed more than 2,000 AFP news articles in six languages every day into Mistral’s chatbot, Le Chat, allowing users to answer questions and help draft documents.
“It’s important to have such agreements to have well-grounded information on validated content,” Arthur Mensch, Mistral’s co-founder and chief executive, told the Financial Times.
The companies presented the deal as a means of ensuring Mistral’s chatbot is grounded in verifiable information. It comes as Meta and Elon Musk’s X have pulled back on content moderation and declared the primacy of “free speech”, in the run-up to incoming US president Donald Trump’s inauguration.
“What it tells us is that Europe must unite to defend its thriving technological sector,” Mensch said about recent moves by Silicon Valley rivals.
“‘Free speech’ is being weaponised against Europe to a great extent and there is this offensive by Big Tech on European regulation,” AFP chief executive Fabrice Fries told the FT. “Precisely 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 Associated Press, a longstanding partner on its search engine, to show the newswire’s feed in its Gemini AI app.
Mistral raised €600mn in new funding at a €6bn valuation in June last year, making it Europe’s most prominent AI company and the continent’s only start-up making large language models that rival the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI.
Mensch said Mistral offered a partnership model that was “more open” and “shares the value more evenly” than its US competitors.
Fries said AFP had discussed licensing deals with several AI companies in recent months, “but it’s only with Mistral that we have had the feeling that it was a genuine partnership, not just a sale agreement”.
Commercial terms of Mistral and AFP’s deal, which runs over multiple years, were not disclosed. But unlike similar agreements struck between US-based OpenAI and other media groups, Fries said the deal was “not a one-off settlement” for data on which large language models are trained.
OpenAI has struck 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 would fund four new local US newsrooms for online publisher Axios, with the output feeding into ChatGPT.
Fries said dealing with AI companies was “still an open battle” and that he was closely tracking the US legal case between OpenAI and the New York Times over copyright infringement claims, which is set to offer a new precedent on the value of the work by publishers to AI model groups.
For AFP, the deal with Mistral also represents an opportunity to make up revenue that will be lost as its fact-checking contract with Meta winds down.
The US social media group said last week that it planned to shift to community-based fact checking in the US. AFP has 150 journalists working for Meta on fact checking, according to Fries.
AFP made about €20mn in 2024 from tech platforms, including fact checking for the likes of Meta and content licensing deals with platforms including Google, accounting for about 10 per cent of its commercial revenues last year.
“Now clearly this pocket of revenue which has helped us grow and show profits in the past seven years is at risk,” Fries said. “We clearly need to find new tech players as a source of revenue and AI actors can be a replacement for the platforms.”
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