Wikipedia’s operator says a bad AI copyright ruling could threaten the open web

The Wikimedia Foundation filed an amicus brief in the lawsuits between publishers including The New York Times and OpenAI and Microsoft, taking neither side and warning that an overly simplified fair use ruling could either deprive Wikipedians of useful AI tools or endanger the open web. It proposes that scraping and unlicensed pre-training be treated as fair use when the output is transformative, but that models reproducing material in response to queries and supplanting readers' engagement with the originals should require a license.