Mistral AI: a historic partnership with the AFP to fight against disinformation
Among the main criticisms made of language models, two often come up: the propensity to invent false information and the fact of relying on dubious sources. To try to curb the second point, we spoke to you a few days ago about the service Ask Verawhich bases its answers on sources deemed reliable. The French startup Mistral AI decided to adopt another approach to address this problem. It has just announced on January 16, 2025 a partnership with Agence France-Presse, the famous “AFP”. Mistral AI obtains access to all of AFP's textual archives since 1983, as well as to the 2,300 daily dispatches produced by the agency. This multi-year collaboration, the amount of which remains confidential, will go down in history. This is in fact the first time that an international news agency has authorized the use of its content by conversational artificial intelligence.
The Cat speaks several languages
Le Chat, Mistral AI's chatbot, will now be able to draw on a corpus of news reports available in six languages: French, English, Spanish, Arabic, German and Portuguese. This documentary base, however, excludes visual content such as photos, videos and infographics. This partnership obviously aims to strengthen the reliability of the chatbot's responses, by relying on verified journalistic sources. For Mistral AI, which aims to become the main European player in AI compared to American giants like OpenAI And Googlethis agreement undoubtedly represents an important launch.
Controlled use of data
The partnership distinguishes two types of uses: questions requiring verified information will be answered via AFP content, while practical requests such as the weather or shopping will rely on the web. Note, however, that this is initially a test phase, which therefore only concerns some of the users. Another important point: AFP content will not be used to train Mistral's computer models. Arthur Mensch, the founder of the startup, specifies that this content constitutes an independent module, which can be deactivated at the end of the contract. A provision which therefore guarantees in theory supervised use of the agency's archives.
A new economic model for the AFP
On the AFP side, this agreement is part of a diversification strategy initiated several years ago. The press agency made a net profit of 1.1 million euros in 2023. Its CEO Fabrice Fries specifies that this collaboration with Mistral AI will generate recurring revenue, unlike traditional AI training agreements. The AFP also retains its state compensation for its missions of general interest, which amounted to 113.3 million euros in 2023. Similar agreements have already been concluded between OpenAI and newspapers such as the Financial Times and Le World. Following the revelation of the partnership between Mistral AI and AFP, Google also announced a partnership with the Associated Press for its Gemini AI.
