Wikipedia signs AI licensing deals with Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon to sustain operations

Wikipedia will share content with AI firms in new licensing deals

On Thursday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced licensing deals with Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI, expanding its effort to charge major tech companies for using Wikipedia content to train the AI models that power AI assistants like Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI's ChatGPT. While these same companies previously scraped Wikipedia without permission, the deals mean that most major AI developers have now signed on to the foundation's Wikimedia Enterprise program, a commercial subsidiary that sells API access to Wikipedia's 65 million articles at higher speeds and volumes than the free public APIs provide. The foundation did not disclose the financial terms of the deals. The new partners join Google, which signed a deal with Wikimedia Enterprise in 2022, as well as smaller companies like Ecosia, Nomic, Pleias, ProRata, and Reef Media. The revenue helps offset infrastructure costs for the nonprofit, which otherwise relies on small public donations while watching its content become a staple of training data for AI models. "Wikipedia is a critical component of these tech companies' work that they need to figure out how to support financially," Lane Becker, president of Wikimedia Enterprise, told Reuters. "It took us a little while to understand the right set of features and functionality to offer if we're going to move these companies from our free platform to a commercial platform... but all our Big Tech partners really see the need for them to commit to sustaining Wikipedia's work." The cost of "free" knowledge The push for paid licensing follows years of rising infrastructure costs as AI companies scraped Wikipedia content at an industrial scale. In April 2025, the foundation reported that bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content had grown 50 percent since January 2024, with bots accounting for 65 percent of the most expensive requests to core infrastructure despite making up just 35 percent of total pageviews. By October, the Wikimedia Foundation disclosed that human traffic to Wikipedia had fallen approximately 8 percent year over year after the organization updated its bot-detection systems and discovered that much of what appeared to be human visitors were actually automated scrapers built to evade detection. The traffic decline threatens the feedback loop that has sustained Wikipedia for a quarter century: Readers visit, some become editors or donors, and the content ostensibly improves. But today, many AI chatbots and search engine summaries answer questions using Wikipedia content without sending users to the site itself. Meanwhile, the foundation's own experiments with generative AI have met resistance from the volunteer editors who maintain the site. In June, Wikipedia paused a pilot program for AI-generated article summaries after editors called it a "ghastly idea" and warned it could undermine trust in the platform. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told The Associated Press that he welcomes AI models training on Wikipedia data. "I'm very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because it's human curated," Wales said. "I wouldn't really want to use an AI that's trained only on X, you know, like a very angry AI." But he drew a line at free access: "You should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that you're putting on us."

Wikimedia Foundation announces new AI partnerships with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Perplexity and others | TechCrunch

As part of its 25th birthday celebration, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a series of new partnerships with AI tech companies that are now customers of its commercial product, Wikimedia Enterprise. Developed by the foundation, Wikimedia Enterprise allows large-scale reuse and distribution of Wikipedia content, as well as content from other Wikimedia projects. In addition to the previously announced partnership with Google in 2022, the organization shared publicly for the first time that it has formed other partnerships with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity over the past year. Other partnerships, like Ecosia, Pleias, and ProRata, have been mentioned before, but are also included in this announcement, along with Nomic and Reef Media. These deals give Wikipedia another way to sustain itself in an age where much of its content is being picked up and reused by AI models and other technology products and services to provide quick, factual answers to consumers' queries. As an enterprise product, Wikimedia Enterprise isn't just about getting tech companies to pay for their use; it also provides them access to Wikimedia projects at a volume and speed designed to meet their data needs. The foundation also noted in a blog post that Wikipedia today is among the top-ten most-visited websites globally, where audiences view more than 65 million articles in over 300 languages, nearly 15 billion times per month. "Wikipedia shows that knowledge is human, and knowledge needs humans. Especially now, in the age of AI, we need the human-powered knowledge of Wikipedia more than ever," noted Wikimedia Foundation's CPO/CTO, Selena Deckelmann, in a statement. "With continued help from readers, volunteer editors, donors, partners, and fans across the globe, Wikipedia will remain the crucial hub for human-powered knowledge and collaboration online for the next 25 years and beyond." In addition to the tech deals announcement, the foundation launched a birthday campaign, which includes a new video docuseries offering a behind-the-scenes look at Wikipedia volunteers around the world. It also launched a "25 Years of Wikipedia" time capsule to explore the site's past, present, and future, with some narration provided by founder Jimmy Wales. The organization will celebrate a livestreamed birthday event as well, on January 15, at 4:00 PM UTC, with guests, games, and entertainment. The event can be found on Wikipedia's YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram channels. The organization's birthday announcements additionally highlighted other recent advances, like upgrades to its tech infrastructure, its own approach to AI, new experiments like games and short-form video, and more.

Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are paying up for 'enterprise' access to Wikipedia

Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI have joined Google in paying the Wikimedia Foundation for access to its projects, including Wikipedia's vast collection of articles. The Wikimedia Foundation announced the news as part of Wikipedia's 25th anniversary on Thursday. The partnerships are part of Wikimedia Enterprise, an initiative launched in 2021 that gives large companies access to a premium version of Wikipedia's API for a fee. Lane Becker, the Wikimedia Foundation's senior director of earned revenue, tells The Verge that the program offers a version of Wikipedia "tuned" for commercial use and AI companies. "We take feature requests, we build features and functionality, and sort of try to structure the data in ways that support what these companies' needs are," Becker says. The Wikimedia Foundation says Microsoft, Perplexity, and Mistral AI joined the Enterprise program "over the past year." Though the company lists Meta and Amazon as "existing" partners, this is the first time they've been announced publicly. The funds collected as part of Wikimedia Enterprise go toward supporting the nonprofit's projects, which Becker says can help it establish a more sustainable business. "It is in every AI company's best interest to support the long-term sustainability of Wikipedia, because Wikipedia and all the other projects that we support are so core to their business," Becker says. "Getting to a new sustainable equilibrium with these new companies is critical for our continued existence, but for their continued existence as well."

Six more AI outfits sign for Wikimedia's fastest APIs

The Wikimedia Foundation, the org behind Wikipedia and other open knowledge platforms, has revealed it's signed six more AI companies as 'enterprise partners', status that gives them preferential access to the content it tends. The org revealed the new partnerships in a post celebrating its 25th birthday, and which points out it is among the world's ten most-visited websites, and the only one to be run by a nonprofit. The post notes that 250,000 editors work on at least one Wikipedia article each month, and that editors make 324 changes each minute as they contribute to the 65 million-plus articles the site contains. 1.5 billion unique devices reach Wikipedia each month. That's a lot of traffic to handle, which doesn't come cheap. One way the Foundation pays for it is with an Enterprise program that offers a suite of APIs designed to provide "more comprehensive, reliable, secure and fast" access to info from the org's projects. The Foundation developed the Enterprise offering to serve the needs of "a very small handful of heavy for-profit users" and promised their fees would "feed back into the Wikimedia movement." According to the 25th birthday post, in the last year the Foundation signed six more Enterprise Partners: Ecosia, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Pleias, and ProRata. All offer AI services, as do the existing AI partners Amazon, Google, and Meta. The work of those 250,000 volunteers is therefore helping Wikimedia and its partners to make money. Microsoft corporate veep Tim Frank welcomed the software behemoth's new relationship with Wikimedia. "Access to high quality, trustworthy information is at the heart of how we think about the future of AI at Microsoft," he said in a canned statement. "Together, we're helping create a sustainable content ecosystem for the AI internet, where contributors are valued, communities are respected, and responsible AI expands opportunity for everyone." Frank appears to have ignored long-standing Wikipedia problems, such as activist and/or paid editors re-writing articles to suit their particular points of view - or those of their clients. Such editors turn Wikipedia's great strength - open access - against it by creating skewed content. Wikimedia hopes the wisdom of the crowd and volunteers addresses any egregious content. Careful Wikipedia users can understand such edits. Others may not. All of the glorious mess that is Wikipedia will soon be ingested by more AIs, whose users may be too lazy or impressionable to think critically about the results delivered by chatbots.

Wikipedia owner signs on Microsoft, Meta in AI content training deals

Jan 15 (Reuters) - Wikipedia on Thursday unveiled partnerships with several Big Tech companies including Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab, Meta (META.O), opens new tab and Amazon (AMZN.O), opens new tab, marking a major step up in the non-profit's ability to monetize tech firms' reliance on its content. Wikimedia Foundation, the operator of the online encyclopedia, said it also signed on AI startup Perplexity and France's Mistral AI, among other firms, over the past year, having enlisted Meta and Amazon as partners previously. It already has an arrangement with Alphabet's Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab, which was announced in 2022. Wikipedia content is crucial to training AI models -- its 65 million articles across over 300 languages are a key part of training data for generative AI chatbots and assistants developed by tech majors. However, companies scraping high volumes of freely available Wikipedia knowledge for AI training has driven up server demand and, subsequently, costs at the non-profit, whose primary source of income is small donations from the public. Wikimedia has been pushing for greater adoption of its enterprise product, which allows tech companies to pay for training access to its content while receiving data in ways that cater to their large-scale training needs. "Wikipedia is a critical component of these tech companies' work that they need to figure out how to support financially," Lane Becker, president of Wikimedia Enterprise, told Reuters in an interview. "It took us a little while to understand the right set of features and functionality to offer if we're going to move these companies from our free platform to a commercial platform ... but all our Big Tech partners really see the need for them to commit to sustaining Wikipedia's work." Wikipedia's content is created and maintained by about 250,000 volunteer editors globally, who write, edit and fact-check the information. "Access to high‑quality, trustworthy information is at the heart of how we think about the future of AI at Microsoft ... (With Wikimedia), we're helping create a sustainable content ecosystem for the AI internet, where contributors are valued," said Microsoft's Corporate Vice President Tim Frank. Wikimedia named former U.S. Ambassador to Chile Bernadette Meehan its new chief executive, effective on January 20, Reuters first reported last month. Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Wikipedia parent partners with Amazon, Meta, Perplexity on AI access

Wikimedia announced new deals with several artificial intelligence companies in a blog post on Thursday, including Amazon, Meta and Perplexity, as part of the company's 25th anniversary. Through the new partnerships under Wikimedia Enterprise, companies will pay Wikipedia to use their data to help develop and train AI models, instead of web scraping. The partnerships with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI and Perplexity were formalized over the last year but have not been publicly shared, Wikimedia said. "All these organizations utilize Wikimedia Enterprise to integrate human-governed knowledge into their platforms at scale," Wikimedia said in the release. The tech companies joined existing partners Ecosia, Pleias, ProRata and Google, which was one of Wikimedia Enterprise's first partners in 2022. "Wikipedia's knowledge powers generative AI chatbots, search engines, voice assistants and more," a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told CNBC. "The long-term future for AI and tech companies depends on nurturing projects like Wikipedia because it creates the human knowledge they rely on." The AI boom has thrown data rights into the spotlight and raised questions and legal issues with the use of human-generated content on sites like Wikipedia and Reddit. Elon Musk launched 'Grokipedia', an AI-powered competitor to Wikipedia, last year. It was promoted by Musk to be less biased and "anti-woke." Entries on Grokipedia, named after xAI's large language model Grok, are all generated by the AI model.

Wikimedia announces AI partners including Meta and Microsoft

As part of Wikipedia's , parent company Wikimedia a slew of partnerships with AI-focused companies like Amazon, Meta, Perplexity, Microsoft and others. The deals are meant to alleviate some of the cost associated with AI chatbots accessing Wikipedia content in enormous volumes by giving the tech companies streamlined access. As noted by , the timeline on these deals is a little squirrely. The Wikipedia foundation says that several companies became enterprise partners "over the past year," while listing Amazon, Google and Meta as "existing" partners. It appears today is the first time they have been officially announced. The organization on this issue last year, saying the reduction in traffic due to LLMs and AI summaries could prove existential for the nonprofit and the world's largest online encyclopedia. Wikipedia's 65 million free articles have served as rich training data for AI chatbots, but all that scraping has driven up server costs at the organization. Wikimedia had been hoping to move these large firms over to its enterprise platform to help with costs. "It took us a little while to understand the right set of features and functionality to offer if we're going to move these companies from our free platform to a commercial platform ... but all our Big Tech partners really see the need for them to commit to sustaining Wikipedia's work," Lane Becker, president of Wikimedia Enterprise told . Under the deal, these companies will have access to high-throughput APIs that can supply chatbot systems with content from Wikipedia as well as Wikimedia's other projects, including Wikivoyage, Wikibooks, Wikiquote and more.

Wikipedia is now getting paid by Meta, Microsoft, Perplexity, and other AI companies

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. As generative AI companies search for cleaner training data, one of the internet's oldest institutions is quietly changing its economic model. The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, has confirmed new agreements with major AI players, including Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity. The deals formalize paid access to the encyclopedia's vast information trove - content that has long functioned as both an open resource and a magnet for automated web scrapers. The foundation said the contracts give participating companies access to structured Wikipedia data at scales and speeds tailored to their requirements. The organization did not disclose financial terms. Even so, the move marks a turning point for one of the world's most visited websites, shifting from a model mainly built on small donations toward commercial partnerships with companies developing the next generation of large language models. Foundation executives say this strategy is a response to soaring technical demands on the network. Automated scraping - often disguised as regular traffic - has intensified as AI developers harvest online text for model training. As a result, the load on Wikipedia's servers has grown significantly, even as human readership has fallen by roughly eight percent over the past year. Wikimedia operates one of the internet's most complex server ecosystems, hosting more than 65 million articles across roughly 300 languages, edited by about 250,000 volunteers. Wikimedia Foundation Chief Executive Officer Maryana Iskander told The Associated Press that maintaining the data infrastructure supporting both human readers and machine access comes at a significant cost. "Our infrastructure is not free," Iskander said. "It costs money to maintain servers and other infrastructure that allows both individuals and tech companies to draw data from Wikipedia." Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has welcomed the partnerships as a practical solution. He argued that models trained on Wikipedia benefit from its human editing process, which filters out misinformation and enforces verification standards. "I'm happy that AI models are training on Wikipedia because it's human-curated," he said, adding that "[AI firms] should chip in and pay for their share of the cost that [they're] putting on us." The debate over data reuse has been contentious across the tech industry. While image libraries and publishers have pursued legal action against unauthorized use of data for training, Wikimedia has taken a different path. Rather than restrict access, the foundation is steering toward collaboration and compensation, acknowledging how Wikipedia's open structure has made it central to the AI ecosystem - and how sustaining that openness requires funding. At the same time, Wikimedia is exploring its own uses for artificial intelligence. Wales described plans to develop tools to automate routine editorial maintenance, such as identifying broken links and recommending source replacements based on contextual analysis. These systems wouldn't replace human editors, he said, but could reduce repetitive work. He also envisioned a future in which Wikipedia's search evolves into a conversational engine that can quote directly from verified text in response to user queries. Wikipedia's journey spans 25 years of collaborative publishing, controversy, and adaptation. The platform remains one of the internet's top ten destinations and a frequent flashpoint in cultural and political debates. Critics, including some US lawmakers and tech figures such as Elon Musk, have accused Wikipedia of ideological bias - a charge Wales dismisses as inevitable in polarized online discourse. Musk's own AI-driven rival, Grokipedia, mirrors Wikipedia's format but relies on large language models that, according to Wales, cannot yet match the encyclopedia's accuracy or editorial depth. Despite the turbulence, Wikimedia's leadership frames the latest deals as a pragmatic recalibration rather than a retreat from its founding ideals. The nonprofit still draws most of its revenue from roughly eight million individual donors. However, enterprise customers now provide a new source of capital in an era where the largest consumers of its data are machines, not people.

Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are paying up for 'enterprise' access to Wikipedia

Perplexity has gifted Wikipedia editors 2,500 free Enterprise seats Tech giants including Ecosia, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Pleias, and ProRata are some of the latest companies to have signed up to pay the Wikimedia Foundation an undisclosed amount for premium access to Wikipedia content, the body announced in a post to commemorate its 25-year anniversary. Amazon, Google, and Meta, some of the Foundation's earlier members, have already been using the commercial API to to "access content from Wikimedia projects at a volume and speed." This revenue is designed to support Wikimedia's nonprofit mission and long-term sustainability, but there's also a bigger AI story at play. The Foundation stressed AI firms rely heavily on Wikipedia, so have a vested interest in keeping it funded. Considered a core dataset for LLM training, Wikipedia is partly responsible for powering chatbots, search engines, and voice assistants globally. Wikimedia Foundation CPO/CTO Selena Deckelmann stressed the importance of Wikipedia's "human-powered knowledge" in the era of AI. "Wikipedia shows that knowledge is human, and knowledge needs humans." In a post remarking Wikimedia's 25th anniversary, Perplexity noted it would be gifting 2,500 Enterprise seats to Wikipedia editors to show its appreciation for their output. There are an estimated 250,000 volunteer editors contributing to the platform, which launched in 2001. Wikimedia now has seven operational data centers (per its own data), though none trace their roots back to its 2001 inception - that one closed in 2004. The most recent, located in São Paulo, Brazil, has been credited with improving load times for the nation's citizens by one-third of a second.

After Being Pillaged By AI Companies, Wikipedia Signs Deal to Get Paid By Them

Wikipedia has signed training deals with a host of major AI companies, helping it recoup some of the exorbitant costs it accrued from being relentlessly pillaged by data scrapers. The companies include Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Perplexity, and France's Mistral AI. As part of the series of licensing deals, revealed Thursday by Wikipedia's operator the Wikimedia Foundation, the AI developers are joining Wikimedia's Enterprise program, which provides direct access to its collection of over 65 million articles. Using Wikipedia and its contents is of course free, but the official program allows quicker access at a "volume and speed designed specifically" for "large-scale reusers and distributors," like AI chatbots. Wikipedia had already agreed a licensing deal with Google in 2022, and also signed deals with smaller AI firms like the search engine Ecosia. Now, with the new slew of deals, Wikipedia has partnered up with every big name in town, and it sees the commercial partnerships as a way to keep the lights on, though it didn't provide specifics on the financials of the deals. "Wikipedia is a critical component of these tech companies' work that they need to figure out how to support financially," Lane Becker, president of Wikimedia Enterprise, told Reuters. "It took us a little while to understand the right set of features and functionality to offer if we're going to move these companies from our free platform to a commercial platform... but all our Big Tech partners really see the need for them to commit to sustaining Wikipedia's work." It's an interesting direction for the nonprofit, which has faced its fair share of struggle over AI's increasing stranglehold over the internet. AI companies heavily relied on free sources of information like Wikipedia to train their AI models in the first place, and continue to frequently cite the encyclopedia for their responses. But as more people turn to chatbots for answers, fewer are visiting Wikipedia, which relies on small donations to stay afloat, and non-paid volunteers to maintain its articles. Moreover, the large-scale data scraping of Wikipedia by AI web crawlers placed a heavy toll on its servers, which are growing more expensive to maintain. In effect, Wikipedia was paying for the AI industry's voracious training -- which isn't what its readers were donating money for, says Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. "They're not donating in order to subsidize these huge AI companies," Wales told the Associated Press. The donors are saying, "You know what, actually you can't just smash our website. You have to sort of come in the right way." There's another reason Wales is onboard with the partnerships: better us than less scrupulous sources. "I'm very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because it's human curated," he told the AP. "I wouldn't really want to use an AI that's trained only on X, you know, like a very angry AI." (Wales is referring to the website owned by Elon Musk. Musk, by the way, has a vendetta against Wikipedia and launched his own AI-generated "Grokipedia" as an anti-woke alternative, which immediately turned out to be racist.) All told, it'll be interesting to see how the deal is received by Wikipedia's editors and writers, who have crusaded against AI content being used on the platform, and rebelled against the site owners when they tried to deploy AI-generated summaries over articles.

Wikipedia Reveals Multiple Deals with AI Giants to Use Its Content - Decrypt

In October last year, the Foundation said site visits were dropping due to people using AI summaries instead of visiting the site. The Wikimedia Foundation has announced a series of new partnerships with artificial intelligence companies that will allow them to use Wikipedia content to train and power their AI models, as the nonprofit seeks to shore up its long-term sustainability amid changing online behavior. The agreements were signed through Wikimedia Enterprise, the foundation's commercial product designed for large-scale reusers and distributors of content from Wikimedia projects. New signups include Ecosia, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Pleias and ProRata. They join existing partners such as Amazon, Google and Meta. "In the AI era, Wikipedia and its human-created and curated knowledge has never been more valuable," the foundation said in a statement. "Its knowledge power[s] generative AI chatbots, search engines, voice assistants and more. Wikipedia is one of the highest-quality datasets used in training Large Language Models." The announcement was made as part of an update tied to Wikipedia's 25th anniversary. The online encyclopedia is among the top ten most-visited websites globally and is the only one in that group operated by a nonprofit organization. Its more than 65 million articles, published in over 300 languages, are viewed nearly 15 billion times each month, according to the foundation. However, it has warned that traffic patterns are shifting. In October, it said human visits to Wikipedia fell 8% year over year, attributing the decline to users relying on AI-generated summaries rather than visiting the site directly. Nearly 60% of Google searches now end without a click, with on-page responses often powered by Wikipedia content. The deals come amid a broader debate over how AI companies obtain training data. Large language models are typically trained on vast amounts of online material, a practice that has drawn criticism from authors, publishers and other rights holders who argue that the use of copyrighted works without permission is infringement. Among them, Reddit is involved in several suits with AI companies for the use of its content to train models, although it has reached licensing agreements with the likes of Google. On Thursday, major book publishers Hachette Book Group and Cengage Group filed a motion to join an existing class action lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of carrying out "historic copyright infringement" to build its Gemini AI platform. The lawsuit alleges Google copied books without proper licenses during its AI training processes. The case was originally filed in 2023 by a group of authors. OpenAI faces a similar case from plaintiffs including "Game of Thrones" writer George R.R. Martin. Entertainment companies are also pressing the issue. In mid-December, Disney sent Google a cease-and-desist letter accusing it of copyright infringement, even as Disney struck a separate licensing deal with OpenAI covering hundreds of characters for AI-generated video. Disney has issued similar notices to other AI firms and is involved in litigation alongside major studios against image-generation company Midjourney. The same month a coalition of writers, actors and technologists launched a new industry group aimed at pushing for enforceable standards governing how AI is trained and used in the entertainment sector. More than 500 prominent figures have backed the initiative, including Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett, Ben Affleck, Guillermo del Toro and Taika Waititi. The European Commission has also opened a formal antitrust investigation into whether Google violated EU competition rules by using publisher and YouTube content to power its AI services without fair compensation or consent. Whether copyright holders will ultimately find recourse isn't certain. Federal judges in the U.S. have recently delivered partial victories to Meta and Anthropic, ruling that their use of copyrighted books to train AI models constituted fair use, while criticizing the companies for maintaining permanent libraries of pirated works.

AI firms need to pay 'fair share' for using Wikipedia, founder says

The founder of the platform says large language models have been 'hammering' Wikipedia's servers and AI companies should "chip in and pay fair share". The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has announced new partnerships with (artificial intelligence) AI tech companies, including Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft. The deal with Wikipedia is part of its commercial product, Wikipedia Enterprise, which allows the reuse and distribution of Wikipedia's content to AI companies. In recent years, the free platform's infrastructure has faced new pressure as AI uses Wikipedia content to train its data models. "They've been absolutely hammering our servers. And so we've been encouraging them to sign up for and use our enterprise products so we can give them a feed," said Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organisation behind Wikipedia, has relied largely on donations from millions of individuals. It says public donations are intended to support free access for readers, not to underwrite commercial AI development. "They're not donating in order to subsidise these huge AI companies," Wales said. They're saying, "You know what, actually, you can't just smash our website. You have to sort of come in the right way." Automated systems, such as large language models (LLMs), are now among the biggest users of Wikipedia's content, placing sustained pressure on Wikipedia's servers. "I would say most data sources, including a tracker that we run, show that people are becoming more reliant on Wikipedia at a time when large language models and a lot of the AI tools are also using Wikipedia to help them be able to provide answers," said Maryana Iskander, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. The volunteer-run platform already has an arrangement with Google, which was announced in 2022, and other agreements with smaller AI players such as Anthropic, Perplexity and France's Mistral AI, as well as search engine Ecosia. Wikipedia's founder says AI companies relying on the site's content should contribute more to its upkeep. "We're trying to work with these companies to basically say, you're using Wikipedia, like everybody needs Wikipedia because it's human-curated knowledge, you should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that you're putting on us," said Wales.

For 25 Years, Wikipedia Trained AI. Now it Wants Payback | AIM

Wikipedia's partnerships with Microsoft, Meta, Perplexity, Mistral, and Amazon have ushered it into the AI era. It has been 25 years since Wikipedia appeared on the internet. What began as an experiment became the world's largest online information source. Now, it is among the most important sources of training data for AI. This month, the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia, announced commercial partnerships with Microsoft, Meta, Perplexity, Mistral, and Amazon. The deals formalise what the AI industry has relied on quietly for years. For two decades, Wikipedia's content has been free to access. That made it a default source of structured text for search engines and later for large language models, even as concerns arose over Wikipedia's factual accuracy. According to a Pew Research report, Wikipedia hosts more than 66 million articles across 342 languages, including all 22 official languages of India. The English edition alone has over 7 million articles and more than 5 billion words. In total, Wikipedia's text, images, videos and media files

Wikipedia inks new deals with AI companies to mark 25th anniversary

The online crowdsourced encyclopedia revealed that it has signed up AI companies, including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Perplexity, Microsoft, and France's Mistral AI. Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of the early internet, but that original vision of a free online space has been clouded by the dominance of Big Tech platforms and the rise of generative AI chatbots trained on content scraped from the web. Aggressive data collection methods by AI developers, including from Wikipedia's vast repository of free knowledge, has raised questions about who ultimately pays for the artificial intelligence boom.

Wikimedia Foundation secures AI data deals with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and more

Coinciding with its 25th anniversary celebrations, the Wikimedia Foundation has publicly unveiled a significant expansion of its commercial partnerships, welcoming major technology firms including Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity as customers of Wikimedia Enterprise. While a similar deal with Google was announced in 2022, this is the first time the organization has formally shared its relationships with these other industry giants, alongside agreements with smaller players such as Ecosia, Pleias, ProRata, Nomic, and Reef Media. These partnerships center on Wikimedia Enterprise, a commercial product developed by the foundation to facilitate the large-scale reuse and distribution of content from Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. These agreements represent a critical strategy for the non-profit's financial sustainability in an era where artificial intelligence increasingly intermediaries online information. By signing on as enterprise customers, tech companies gain access to Wikimedia's vast data repositories at a volume and speed specifically designed to meet their needs, allowing them to power their AI models and services with factual, up-to-date information. Crucially, this creates a formal revenue stream from the very entities that utilize Wikipedia's content to provide direct answers to consumers, ensuring the platform remains viable even if direct website traffic fluctuates due to changing user behaviors. Despite the rise of AI-generated answers, the foundation emphasized the enduring value of human-curated information, noting that Wikipedia remains one of the top 10 most-visited websites globally. The site currently hosts over 65 million articles in more than 300 languages and attracts nearly 15 billion views per month. Selena Deckelmann, the Foundation's CPO/CTO, highlighted this distinction, stating that "knowledge is human, and knowledge needs humans." She argued that in the age of AI, the human-powered consensus of Wikipedia is more essential than ever, serving as a crucial hub for reliable information supported by readers, donors, and volunteer editors worldwide. To mark the quarter-century milestone, the organization has launched a "25 Years of Wikipedia" campaign, which includes a docuseries offering a behind-the-scenes look at global volunteers and a time capsule narrated by founder Jimmy Wales that explores the site's history and future. The celebrations also featured a livestreamed event on January 15 replete with guests and entertainment across social platforms. Beyond the festivities, the foundation highlighted ongoing technical improvements, including upgrades to its infrastructure, a defined approach to AI integration, and new experimental formats such as games and short-form video to engage future generations of knowledge seekers.

Wikipedia inks AI deals with Microsoft, Meta and Perplexity as it marks 25th birthday

Wikipedia is striking new business deals with major AI firms like Amazon and Microsoft. These agreements allow AI companies to access Wikipedia's vast content. This move aims to monetize the heavy traffic generated by AI bots. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales welcomes AI training on its data. The foundation seeks fair payment for the infrastructure supporting this access. Wikipedia unveiled new business deals with a slew of artificial intelligence companies on Thursday as it marked its 25th anniversary. The online crowdsourced encyclopedia revealed that it has signed up AI companies including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Perplexity, Microsoft and France's Mistral AI. ET Budget Survey: Tell us your wishlist Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of the early internet, but that original vision of a free online space has been clouded by the dominance of Big Tech platforms and the rise of generative AI chatbots trained on content scraped from the web. Aggressive data collection methods by AI developers, including from Wikipedia's vast repository of free knowledge, has raised questions about who ultimately pays for the artificial intelligence boom. The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the site, signed Google as one of its first customers in 2022 and announced other agreements last year with smaller AI players like search engine Ecosia. The new deals will help one of the world's most popular websites monetize heavy traffic from AI companies. They're paying to access Wikipedia content "at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs," the foundation said. It did not provide financial or other details. While AI training has sparked legal battles elsewhere over copyright and other issues, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he welcomes it. "I'm very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because it's human curated," Wales told The Associated Press in an interview. "I wouldn't really want to use an AI that's trained only on X, you know, like a very angry AI," Wales said, referring to billionaire Elon Musk's social media platform. Wales said the site wants to work with AI companies, not block them. But "you should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that you're putting on us." The Wikimedia Foundation last year urged AI developers to pay for access through its enterprise platform and said human traffic had fallen 8%. Meanwhile, visits from bots, sometimes disguised to evade detection, were heavily taxing its servers as they scrape masses of content to feed AI large language models. The findings highlighted shifting online trends as search engine AI overviews and chatbots summarize information instead of sending users to sites by showing them links. Wikipedia is the ninth most visited site on the internet. It has more than 65 million articles in 300 languages that are edited by some 250,000 volunteers. The site has become so popular in part because its free for anyone to use. "But our infrastructure is not free, right?" Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander said in a separate interview in Johannesburg, South Africa. It costs money to maintain servers and other infrastructure that allows both individuals and tech companies to "draw data from Wikipedia," said Iskander, who's stepping down on Jan. 20, and will be replaced by Bernadette Meehan. The bulk of Wikipedia's funding comes from 8 million donors, most of them individuals. "They're not donating in order to subsidize these huge AI companies," Wales said. They're saying, "You know what, actually you can't just smash our website. You have to sort of come in the right way." Editors and users could benefit from AI in other ways. The Wikimedia Foundation has outlined an AI strategy that Wales said could result in tools that reduce tedious work for editors. While AI isn't good enough to write Wikipedia entries from scratch, it could, for example, be used to update dead links by scanning the surrounding text and then searching online to find other sources. "We don't have that yet but that's the kind of thing that I think we will see in the future." Artificial intelligence could also improve the Wikipedia search experience, by evolving from the traditional keyword method to more of a chatbot style, Wales said. "You can imagine a world where you can ask the Wikipedia search box a question and it will quote to you from Wikipedia," he said. It could respond by saying "here's the answer to your question from this article and here's the actual paragraph. That sounds really useful to me and so I think we'll move in that direction as well. " Reflecting on the early days, Wales said it was a thrilling time because many people were motivated to help build Wikipedia after he and co-founder Larry Sanger, who departed long ago, set it up as an experiment. However, while some might look back wistfully on what seems now to be a more innocent time, Wales said those early days of the internet also had a dark side. "People were pretty toxic back then as well. We didn't need algorithms to be mean to each other," he said. "But, you know, it was a time of great excitement and a real spirit of possibility." Wikipedia has lately found itself under fire from figures on the political right, who have dubbed the site "Wokepedia" and accused it of being biased in favor of the left. Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Congress are investigating alleged "manipulation efforts" in Wikipedia's editing process that they said could inject bias and undermine neutral points of view on its platform and the AI systems that rely on it. A notable source of criticism is Musk, who last year launched his own AI-powered rival, Grokipedia. He has criticized Wikipedia for being filled with "propaganda" and urged people to stop donating to the site. Wales said he doesn't consider Grokipedia a "real threat" to Wikipedia because it's based on large language models, which are the troves of online text that AI systems are trained on. "Large language models aren't good enough to write really quality reference material. So a lot of it is just regurgitated Wikipedia," he said. "It often is quite rambling and sort of talks nonsense. And I think the more obscure topic you look into, the worse it is." He stressed that he wasn't singling out criticism of Grokipedia. "It's just the way large language models work." Wales say he's known Musk for years but they haven't been in touch since Grokipedia launched. "I should probably ping him," Wales said. What would he say? "'How's your family?' I'm a nice person, I don't really want to pick a fight with anybody." (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel)

Wikipedia owner signs on Microsoft, Meta in AI content training deals

Wikimedia Foundation, the operator of the online encyclopedia, said it also signed on AI startup Perplexity and France's Mistral AI, among other firms, over the past year, having enlisted Meta and Amazon as partners previously. Wikipedia on Thursday unveiled partnerships with several Big Tech companies including Microsoft, Meta and Amazon, marking a major step up in the non-profit's ability to monetize tech firms' ⁠reliance on its content. Wikimedia Foundation, the operator of the online encyclopedia, said it also signed on AI startup Perplexity and France's Mistral AI, among other firms, over the past year, having enlisted Meta and Amazon as partners previously. It already has an arrangement with Alphabet's Google, which was announced in 2022. Wikipedia content is crucial to training AI models - its 65 million articles across over 300 languages are a key part of training data for generative AI chatbots and assistants developed by tech majors. However, companies scraping high volumes of freely available Wikipedia knowledge for AI training has driven up server demand and, subsequently, costs at the non-profit, whose primary source of income is small donations from the public. Wikimedia has been pushing for greater adoption of its enterprise product, which allows tech companies to pay for training access to its content while receiving data in ways that cater to their large-scale training needs. "Wikipedia is a critical component of these tech companies' work that they need to figure out how to support financially," Lane Becker, president of Wikimedia Enterprise, told Reuters in an interview. "It took us a little while to understand the right set of features and functionality to offer if we're going to move these companies from our free platform to a commercial platform ... but all our Big Tech partners really see the need for them to commit ⁠to sustaining Wikipedia's work." Wikipedia's ⁠content is created and maintained by about 250,000 volunteer editors globally, who write, edit and fact-check the information. "Access to high‑quality, trustworthy information is at the heart of how we think about the future of AI at Microsoft ... (With Wikimedia), we're helping create a sustainable content ecosystem for the AI internet, where contributors are valued," said Microsoft's Corporate Vice President Tim Frank. Wikimedia named former U.S. Ambassador to Chile Bernadette Meehan its new chief executive, effective on January 20, Reuters first reported last month.

Amazon, Meta and Microsoft Join Wikimedia's Commercial Platform for AI Training | PYMNTS.com

Wikipedia, which is marking its 25th anniversary on Thursday, has become "one of the highest-quality datasets for training large language models," the post said. The platform's 65 million articles in 300 languages help power generative AI chatbots, search engines and voice assistants. "In the AI era, Wikipedia's human-created and curated knowledge has never been more valuable," Wikimedia Enterprise said in the post. Wikimedia Enterprise provides tech companies with high-throughput API access to Wikipedia through their choice of an On-demand API that returns the most recent version for an article request, a Snapshot API that provides Wikipedia as a downloadable file that is updated every hour, and a Realtime API that streams updates as they are made, according to the post. "As knowledge on Wikipedia continues to grow to close knowledge gaps and include more languages, its value as a dataset for a broad spectrum of use cases also increases," the post said. Perplexity said in a Wednesday blog post that to mark Wikipedia's anniversary, it is offering the platform a gift of 2,500 Perplexity Enterprise seats to share with its editors. "Perplexity is a Wikimedia Enterprise customer because we're proud to support the foundation's mission to keep knowledge free and accessible for everyone," the company said in its post. In November, the Wikimedia Foundation called on AI companies and developers to use Wikimedia Enterprise to "responsibly" access its content, rather than scraping information from the Wikipedia site. The foundation said at the time that making Wikimedia Enterprise a paid service sustains Wikipedia's global volunteer editor base and nonprofit funding model. It added that the paid API platform enables AI companies to efficiently use its content without overburdening its servers.

'If You Can't Beat Them, Join Them': Wikipedia Shows the Way Into an AI Universe

Wikipedia is celebrating 25 years of its existence and has repeatedly sought funds to sustain its voluntary efforts When ChatGPT came calling, those at Wikipedia saw it as a great tool, but very bad. Two years and some months later, the Wikimedia Foundation, the company that operates it, has announced a series of commercial partnerships Big Tech giants in the AI space. Quite clearly, survival matters and Jimmy Wales knows that it's better to join what you cannot fight and stave off. As the world celebrates 25 years of the foundation, it is quite clear that those at the helm recognise that they aren't at the crossroads. More like a roundabout where whichever road you take to arrive at it, you just go round and round. The announcement dated January 15, 2026 starts off reminding us how their products became the bulwark of "trustworthy, human-created knowledge accessible worldwide" and then goes on to list out the "partners who help sustain this mission." Can't blame them, can we? This is what happens when we do not contribute to such altruistic causes. Those with the cash will buy them and desecrate the purpose. "Today, we are announcing Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity for the first time as they join our roster of partners, which includes Google, Ecosia, Nomic, Pleias, ProRata and Reef Media, says the post. "All of them utilise Wikimedia Enterprise to integrate human-governed knowledge into their platforms at scale." Looks like a win-win situation for both, right? While Wikipedia can continue to generate human-created knowledge, the AI superstars can suck it all up and deliver smart answers. What we can safely say for now is that these deals would put some cash into the hands of Wikipedia to sustain itself in an era where most of the content is being crawled and used for training AI models. So, while we as users get quick and factual answers to our queries in the bat of an eyelid, there still has to be tireless eyes that find it first. However, there's one question we'd like to ask. What about those out there who spent tireless hours researching and finding the knowledge? Will any part of this windfall ever reach them? From the point of view of these AI Internet trash collectors, Wikimedia Enterprise provides them the best bang for their bucks. It provides easy access, reliable knowledge that is constantly monitored and fixed by a large group of selfless web watches, and does all of this at pace and in volumes required to satiate the data gluttony. Not for anything has Wikipedia become one of the top-10 most visited websites globally. On an average, users check out more than 65 million articles across 300 languages. And they do this more than 15 billion times each month. "Wikipedia shows that knowledge is human, and knowledge needs humans. Especially now, in the age of AI, we need the human-powered knowledge of Wikipedia more than ever," says Wikimedia Foundation's CPO/CTO, Selena Deckelmann. "With continued help from readers, volunteer editors, donors, partners, and fans across the globe, Wikipedia will remain the crucial hub for human-powered knowledge and collaboration online for the next 25 years and beyond," she says in a statement. Coming to some good news worth celebrating... the foundation began a birthday campaign that includes a video documentary series giving all of us users a behind-the-scenes look at the Wikipedia volunteers. Then there is also the "25 Years of Wikipedia" time capsule that offers a glimpse of its past, present and the future. In a live-streamed event yesterday, founder Jimmy Wales and others joined guests to have a good time. You can watch the video here and maybe send these guys a "Thank You" note in the comments section of YouTube. There is still some merit in doing the hard yards. Also worth remembering that however smart AI can get, there's always a human hand required to guide it. Thank You Wikipedia!

Wikipedia Signs AI Content Deals With Microsoft, Meta & More

Wikipedia has announced AI content licensing deals with major technology companies, including Microsoft, Meta, Perplexity, and Mistral AI. The Wikimedia Foundation announced this on January 15, 2026, as part of its 25th anniversary celebrations. These agreements expand the reach of Wikimedia Enterprise, the Foundation's commercial platform that provides structured, high-volume access to Wikipedia's vast corpus of human-curated content for AI training and other advanced uses. According to the Foundation, the Enterprise programme enables companies to access content "at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs," offering structured data access that goes beyond informal scraping of the publicly accessible site, while supporting the nonprofit's mission to keep Wikipedia free and open for all. Furthermore, Lane Becker, senior director of Wikimedia Enterprise, explained to The Verge, "We take feature requests, we build features and functionality, and sort of try to structure the data in ways that support these companies' needs." She added that "it is in every AI company's best interest to support the long-term sustainability of Wikipedia, because Wikipedia and all the other projects that we support are so core to their business." The Wikimedia Foundation created Wikimedia Enterprise as a commercial product to make large-scale reuse of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia project content more efficient, reliable, and suitable for high-volume use. It was launched on October 25, 2021, to meet the needs of companies and organisations that require frequent, structured access to Wikimedia's data. Unlike the publicly available APIs and data dumps that serve casual users and developers, Wikimedia Enterprise delivers enterprise-grade APIs (Advanced APIs designed for large-scale commercial use) that provide machine-readable, parsed, and structured content at scale. This ensures that partners can quickly access and process information across Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects without investing in extensive internal tooling to scrape or clean raw data. Moreover, Wikimedia Enterprise operates as an opt-in commercial service backed by enterprise contracts and service-level agreements, offering companies a more reliable alternative to public APIs and data dumps. The Wikimedia Foundation said the platform was built specifically for organisations that require high-volume, commercial reuse of Wikimedia content and need efficient access supported by formal agreements. Importantly, most of the data remains available under free Creative Commons licences, with metadata clearly explaining the licence terms. Wikimedia Enterprise adds value through enhanced access, advanced consulting, and data management, rather than replacing free access. The Wikimedia Foundation has warned that automated scraping by AI bots and crawlers is driving up costs due to increased bandwidth demand, a burden that its donation-funded model struggles to absorb. According to the Foundation, bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content has surged by roughly 50% since January 2024. This rise is not coming from human readers but primarily from automated programmes collecting data for AI training. Much of this traffic consists of bots scanning Wikimedia Commons' repository of 144 million images, videos, and other media, which is more expensive to serve from core data centres than popular cached pages. Furthermore, Wikimedia found that bots account for about 65% of the most costly requests to its infrastructure, despite representing only around 35% of total pageviews. This is because bots tend to request less-popular content that falls outside regional caches and must be served directly from core data centres. This pattern places disproportionate demands on computing resources and contributes to rising operational expenses. At the same time, Wikimedia's own user trends update showed that real human pageviews declined by around 8% year-on-year in 2025, in part because search engines and generative AI tools trained on Wikipedia content increasingly answer questions directly without directing users back to Wikipedia pages. Overall, this combination of rising automated load and declining reader traffic reflects a structural cost pressure on Wikipedia's infrastructure in the AI era, with co-founder Jimmy Wales acknowledging that non-human traffic is financially taxing due to higher server costs. Wikipedia sits at the centre of the internet's knowledge economy. It underpins search engines, voice assistants, knowledge graphs, and now generative AI systems used by hundreds of millions of people every day, while also serving as a free source of knowledge for netizens worldwide. However, as AI developers and data companies increasingly rely on Wikipedia's content at an industrial scale, the nonprofit's open model is coming under unprecedented technical and financial strain. On the one hand, Wikipedia's articles, images, and structured data have become core training material for large language models and AI search tools. As a result, automated bots now generate a large share of the platform's most expensive traffic, driving up bandwidth and server costs while contributing little to the donation system that funds the site. At the same time, human pageviews are falling as AI tools answer questions directly, reducing the visibility of Wikipedia itself and weakening a key source of donor engagement. This shift matters because Wikipedia operates on a razor-thin margin. The Wikimedia Foundation runs one of the world's most visited websites while remaining donation-funded and free to use. Yet it now faces a future in which machines, not people, consume much of its content, and do so at a scale that strains infrastructure built for human readers. In effect, Wikipedia has become a critical piece of digital infrastructure for the AI era. How it balances open access with sustainability will shape not only the future of free knowledge, but also the economics of the wider AI ecosystem.

Wikipedia owner signs on Microsoft, Meta in AI content training deals

Jan 15 (Reuters) - Wikipedia on Thursday unveiled partnerships with several Big Tech companies including Microsoft, Meta and Amazon, marking a major step up in the non-profit's ability to monetize tech firms' reliance on its content. Wikimedia Foundation, the operator of the online encyclopedia, said it also signed on AI startup Perplexity and France's Mistral AI, among other firms, over the past year, having enlisted Meta and Amazon as partners previously. It already has an arrangement with Alphabet's Google, which was announced in 2022. Wikipedia content is crucial to training AI models -- its 65 million articles across over 300 languages are a key part of training data for generative AI chatbots and assistants developed by tech majors. However, companies scraping high volumes of freely available Wikipedia knowledge for AI training has driven up server demand and, subsequently, costs at the non-profit, whose primary source of income is small donations from the public. Wikimedia has been pushing for greater adoption of its enterprise product, which allows tech companies to pay for training access to its content while receiving data in ways that cater to their large-scale training needs. "Wikipedia is a critical component of these tech companies' work that they need to figure out how to support financially," Lane Becker, president of Wikimedia Enterprise, told Reuters in an interview. "It took us a little while to understand the right set of features and functionality to offer if we're going to move these companies from our free platform to a commercial platform ... but all our Big Tech partners really see the need for them to commit to sustaining Wikipedia's work." Wikipedia's content is created and maintained by about 250,000 volunteer editors globally, who write, edit and fact-check the information. "Access to high-quality, trustworthy information is at the heart of how we think about the future of AI at Microsoft ... (With Wikimedia), we're helping create a sustainable content ecosystem for the AI internet, where contributors are valued," said Microsoft's Corporate Vice President Tim Frank. Wikimedia named former U.S. Ambassador to Chile Bernadette Meehan its new chief executive, effective on January 20, Reuters first reported last month. (Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona)