Wikimedia Files Amicus Brief in AI Copyright Case
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In a batch of AI copyright lawsuits brought by publishers (including The New York Times) against OpenAI and Microsoft, the Wikimedia Foundation filed an amicus brief on October 30, 2026. The core argument of the brief is a distinction between LLM training and LLM output: on one hand, crawling web pages and using copyrighted works to pre-train LLMs should qualify as fair use; on the other hand, when a model outputs content that substitutes for the original work, the applicable licensing requirements should be honored. This is the Wikimedia Foundation's publicly stated position in this series of copyright lawsuits; there are no reports yet of any response to the brief from the courts or the parties involved.
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- The Verge · AIWikipedia’s operator says a bad AI copyright ruling could threaten the open web
The Wikimedia Foundation has filed an amicus brief in a set of AI copyright lawsuits brought by publishers (including The New York Times) against OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing that scraping web pages and pretraining LLMs on copyrighted works should qualify as fair use, but that models outputting content that substitutes for the original works to users should comply with licensing requirements.
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