The nonprofit behind Wikipedia has weighed in on the biggest AI copyright fight, and its answer is neither side's. On October 30, 2026, the Wikimedia Foundation filed a friend-of-the-court brief in New York court in the consolidated copyright cases against OpenAI and Microsoft, including The New York Times' lawsuit. The filing asks the judge to draw a sharp line between training an AI model and using a chatbot to serve up someone else's work.
The case, formally titled In re: OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, combines 12 lawsuits against OpenAI in the Southern District of New York. The Times filed its suit in 2023, alleging that OpenAI and Microsoft used its copyrighted articles without permission, including to train AI systems. OpenAI and Microsoft counter that training models on publicly available data is technological development that falls within fair use. The court has yet to rule on that central question.
A middle path between two extremes
Wikimedia says it backs neither party, describing both sides' readings of fair use as overbroad and simplified. For model training, the foundation leans toward the AI companies: using copyrighted works to train a model can be fair use when the resulting model is something new and different from the original sources, in which case it argues no licensing terms should be required.
For retrieval-augmented generation, known as RAG, it takes the opposite view. RAG is the technique by which a chatbot finds current web content and delivers it back to users in an answer, grounding its reply in live sources. Wikimedia argues that when a chatbot retrieves material and returns it in a form that can stand in for the original, that use should not count as fair use. Companies offering such features should respect each publisher's licensing requirements. For Wikipedia itself, that licence is Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0, which requires credit to the original creators and requires adaptations to remain under the same licence.
Why Wikipedia says it matters
The stakes, in Wikimedia's telling, run in both directions. A ruling that adopts too restrictive a version of fair use could inhibit technological innovation and limit tools that benefit open-source projects like Wikipedia, the foundation argues. A ruling in favour of blanket fair use, by contrast, could lead to a more closed web, where knowledge online is weakened because the secondary sources that AI answers draw on are starved of readers and revenue.
"We are taking a position in this case to defend the free and open human knowledge that Wikipedia depends on," chief executive Bernadette Meehan said. "Expanding access to knowledge through AI is a powerful goal, but it must respect the people, contributors, and communities that make reliable knowledge possible."
Wikipedia is one of the most popular and trusted open-knowledge sites in the world, with more than 67 million articles across 300 languages and nearly 250,000 volunteers contributing each month. The foundation notes it is a leading dataset used to train large language models.
What happens next
An amicus brief does not bind the court; it offers arguments from an organisation that is not a party to the case for the judge to consider. The judge has not yet decided whether to accept Wikimedia's brief, and no date is confirmed for a ruling that could settle the fair-use question without a full trial.
If the court adopts Wikimedia's split, AI companies would gain clearer protection for training while facing stricter obligations for the answers their chatbots actually show users. If it does not, the fight over who owns the raw material of the AI age will simply move to the next courtroom.
