Wikipedia unveiled new business agreements with several artificial intelligence companies on Thursday as it marked its 25th anniversary. The online, crowdsourced encyclopedia said it has signed deals with AI firms including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Perplexity, Microsoft, and France-based Mistral AI.
Often regarded as one of the last bastions of the early internet, Wikipedia’s original vision of a free and open online space has increasingly been challenged by the dominance of Big Tech platforms and the rapid rise of generative AI chatbots trained on content scraped from the web.
AI training raises questions over cost and fair use
Aggressive data collection by AI developers, drawing heavily from Wikipedia’s vast repository of free knowledge, has raised questions about who ultimately bears the cost of the artificial intelligence boom.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia, signed Google as one of its first enterprise customers in 2022 and announced additional agreements last year with smaller AI players, including search engine Ecosia.
The newly announced deals are expected to help one of the world’s most visited websites monetize the heavy traffic generated by AI companies. These firms are paying to access Wikipedia content “at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs,” the foundation said, without disclosing financial details.
Jimmy Wales welcomes AI training on Wikipedia data
While AI training has sparked legal battles elsewhere over copyright and content ownership, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he welcomes the practice.
“I’m very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because it’s human curated,” Wales told The Associated Press. He added that he would not want to rely on AI trained only on content from Elon Musk’s social media platform X, joking that it could result in “a very angry AI”.
Wales said Wikipedia wants to work with AI companies rather than block them, but stressed that they should “chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that you’re putting on us.”
Human traffic falls as bot activity surges
Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation urged AI developers to pay for access through its enterprise platform, noting that human traffic to Wikipedia had declined by 8 per cent. At the same time, visits from bots, sometimes disguised to evade detection, have placed heavy strain on Wikipedia’s servers as they scrape large volumes of content to train AI models.
The trend reflects broader shifts in online behaviour, as AI-powered search summaries and chatbots increasingly provide answers directly instead of directing users to websites through links.
