Skip to content

Analytics cookies

We use Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to count visits and see which pages are useful. If you accept, Google Analytics may set cookies to recognise your return visits. If you decline, it sets no cookies, but Google still receives a cookieless signal for each page you view. We don’t send Google your name, email address or registration details, and you can change your choice at any time under “Cookie settings” at the bottom of the page. Privacy

Wikimedia Foundation files amicus brief urging split fair-use ruling in OpenAI copyright case

Oct 30, 2026 · Gathered automatically from public sources. Not reviewed by a person.

What happened

On 30 October 2026, the Wikimedia Foundation announced it had submitted an amicus brief in In re: OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, the consolidated copyright litigation in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York whose best-known member is The New York Times Co. v. Microsoft and OpenAI. The Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia, said it was intervening to defend the open-knowledge ecosystem in a case that will decide whether AI companies' use of copyrighted content to train large language models is fair use.

The split position

The brief, styled as supporting neither party, proposes a use-by-use fair-use framework. For model training, the Foundation argues that using copyrighted content should be considered fair when it trains models that are something new and different from the original sources, with no requirement to meet copyright licensing terms. For retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and newer techniques that serve a similar "grounding" purpose, it argues the opposite: the use should not be considered fair, and companies offering such features should respect each content platform's licensing requirements. In Wikipedia's case that license is Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0, which requires credit to original creators and that remixes stay under the same license.

The Foundation warns in both directions: a too-restrictive fair-use ruling could inhibit innovation and limit tools that benefit open-source projects like Wikipedia, while a blanket fair-use ruling could produce a more closed web where knowledge online is weakened by a lack of secondary source materials. It also says scraping of Wikimedia projects must be done sustainably, in line with its public API rate limits or through its Enterprise API offerings.

Context

The underlying lawsuit, filed by The New York Times in 2023, alleges OpenAI and Microsoft's use of Times-owned content for any purpose, including AI model training, directly violates copyright law. OpenAI and Microsoft argue that training and deploying models based on publicly available data is technological development that falls within fair use. The Foundation says the ruling here will be highly influential because of the jurisdiction and parties involved and because only a few cases have addressed the question so far. The brief joins a wave of amicus activity in the same litigation, including the 29 October joint brief from SAG-AFTRA, the Writers Guilds and the American Federation of Musicians, which is already published in this tracker.

Sources