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French artificial intelligence start-up Mistral has struck a multimillion-euro deal with Agence France-Presse to feed thousands of newswire articles into its chatbot, pitching the connection as a European bulwark against fact-checking attacks 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, at a time when many media groups are deciding whether to sign licensing deals with AI companies or take legal action over alleged copyrights violation.
The contract, announced on Thursday, will feed more than 2,000 people AFP newspaper articles in six languages every day to Mistral’s chatbot, Le Chat, allowing users to answer questions and help create documents.
“It’s important to have such agreements so that we have well-founded information about verified content,” Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral, told the Financial Times.
The companies pitched the agreement as a way to ensure that Mistral’s chatbot is based on verifiable information. It comes after Elon Musk’s Meta and X pulled content moderation and proclaimed the primacy of “freedom of speech”on the eve of the inauguration of the future US president Donald Trump.
“What it tells us is that Europe needs to come together to defend its advanced technology sector,” Mensch said of the recent moves by the Silicon Valley rival.
“‘Freedom of speech’ is being heavily weaponized against Europe and there is this Big Tech offensive on European regulationAFP CEO Fabrice Fries told the FT. “Just this kind of deal, in the current context, shows that the AI player has bet on independent, professional, fact-based journalism.”
On Wednesday, Google announced a similar deal with the Associated Press, its longtime search engine partner, to display news feeds in its Gemini AI app.
Mistral collected EUR 600 million new financing at a valuation of €6 billion last June, making it Europe’s most prominent AI company and the only start-up on the continent building large-scale language models to 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 American competitors.
Fries said AFP has discussed licensing deals with several of them AI company in recent months, “but only with Mistral do we have the feeling that it was a real partnership and not just a sales contract”.
The commercial terms of the contract between Mistral and AFP, which lasts for several years, have not been published. But unlike similar deals struck between US-based OpenAI and other media groups, Fries said the deal is “not a one-time settlement” for the data used to train large language models.
OpenAI has entered into content deals with media groups including News Corp, Axel Springer and 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 results being fed into ChatGPT.
Fries said that doing business with AI companies is “still an open battle” and that he is closely following the US legal case between OpenAI and the New York Times over claims of copyright infringement, which should offer a new precedent on the value of work by publishers to AI model groups .
For the AFP, the Mistral contract also represents an opportunity to make up for the revenue that will be lost as its fact-checking contract with Met comes to an end.
The US social media group said last week it plans to move to community-based fact-checking in the US. The AFP has 150 journalists who work for the Meta to fact-check, according to Fries.
The AFP earned around 20 million euros in 2024 from technology platforms, including fact-checking for Meta and content licensing deals with platforms including Google, which accounted for around 10 percent of its commercial revenue last year.
“Now it’s clear that this pocket of revenue that has helped us grow and show a profit for the past seven years is in jeopardy,” Fries said. “It is clear that we need to find new technology players as a source of revenue, and AI actors can be a substitute for platforms.”
