exactly, the only reason Mozilla exists today is as a legal shield against an anti-browser monopoly suit against Google. that's the product they sell, and Google is paying hundreds of millions per year for this valuable service
I thought google pay Mozilla so they don't set the default search engine to something else (they same way Google pay Apple for Safari) and so Google continues to dominate and makes money of ads.
Papers submitted to arXiv under its most permissive license should always be free, as in beer, speech, freedom. For researchers that contribute to it, that is the intention for a reason. It is to serve public and corporate good without restriction.
This isn't me siding with AI companies by the way; it's a slippery slope argument.
The papers can make it free, they can just build a convenient search/retrieval API layer so Open AI and Anthropic don't pay 1-2 engineers a year at 1-2m to crawl and index that info for training.
The AI services have an option then to pay for this service, support a open service, or write their own crawler. I think if every open AI request didn't just do a web search but a more targeted arXiv search the results would be better.