A day after Google inked a deal with The Associated Press, also Mistral informed a content deal with Agence France-Presse (AFP) to improve the accuracy of responses to The CatMistral’s chatbot product.

This is the first deal of its kind for the Paris-based artificial intelligence company. And this indicates that Mistral does not want to be considered “just” a foundation model maker.

It also wants to build attractive products, starting with Le Chat. From what I hear, the company is also working on dedicated apps to access Le Chat and better compete with ChatGPT or Claude.

Going forward, Le Chat will be able to tap into the daily production of AFP stories. And because AFP is one of the largest news agencies in the world, it represents a significant amount of text — about 2,300 stories per day in six languages ​​(Arabic, English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish).

Le Chat is able to query the entire archive of AFP since 1983. However, photos and videos are not part of this multi-year agreement. As a reminder, Mistral focuses on large language models and does not offer rendering models.

OpenAI is leading the charge when it comes to content deals. The creator of ChatGPT has signed partnerships with AP, Axel Springer, Condé Nast, El País, Financial Times, Le Monde, and others. It will be interesting to see if Mistral has more content partnerships in the works.

“We believe that improving the accuracy of (Le Chat’s) responses is an important step in deploying our technology, especially for businesses,” said Mistral co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch in a statement. “Through this partnership, we provide our clients with a unique multicultural and multilingual alternative.”

Today’s partnership is also a first for AFP. And it couldn’t come at a better time, as Meta is ending its third-party fact-checking program just last week. AFP is one of the main partners of the Meta fact-checking system. “Through this partnership, AFP is further diversifying its sources of revenue,” AFP chairman and CEO Fabrice Fries said in a statement.

While the AI ​​industry seeks to improve its products in these arrangements, there are two effects that can be considered additional benefits. First, AI companies can position themselves as (financial) allies of news organizations. Second, these partnerships protect them from potential copyright infringement claims.