Wikimedia Foundation announced on 15 January that it had signed artificial intelligence deals with a number of AI companies on its 25th anniversary, as per an AP report.
The Wikimedia Foundation is the parent of the online crowdsourced encyclopedia and free internet knowledge bastion, Wikipedia. The deals signed are with leading AI firms, including Amazon, France's Mistral AI, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Perplexity, it added.
This comes after the non-profit first signed a deal with Google in 2022, and other smaller players such as Ecosia in 2025, the AP report noted.
Why is this significant?
Free to use, Wikipedia is the ninth most-visited website on the internet. It has over 65 million articles in 300 languages, edited by around 2,50,000 volunteers.
These deals with AI companies are significant because, in 2024, Wikipedia reported an 8% decline in human pageviews caused by increasing generative AI (gen AI) providing answers on search engines that do not direct readers to individual websites.
The Wikimedia Foundation had then noted that evolving internet trends and sophisticated bot traffic are reshaping how people access information globally.
It is also significant because, as the AP report noted, Wikipedia remains among the last standing bastions of the early internet, whose vision of a free online space has been muddied by the dominance of Big Tech, gen AI and AI chatbots trained on content scraped from the web.
There is an increasingly bigger question about who pays for the AI boom amid aggressive data collection methods used by AI developers, including from Wikipedia's vast repository of free knowledge.
Wikipedia's new AI deals: What we know
- Wikipedia's new deals will help the platform monetise heavy traffic from AI companies.
- AI companies as they pay to access Wikipedia content “at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs,” the foundation said.
- Further details were not provided.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales: ‘Happy AI is training on human-curated data’
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he welcomes this turn of events. “I'm very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because it’s human-curated. I wouldn’t really want to use an AI that’s trained only on X, you know, like a very angry AI,” Wales told AP in an interview. He was referring to billionaire Elon Musk's social media platform, which rebranded from Twitter and hosts his AI bot Grok.
Wales said Wikipedia will not block AI companies, but wants to work with them, provided the compensation is fair. “You (AI companies) should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that you’re putting on us.” Notably, across the world, aggressive scraping and training of chatbots by AI companies has been met with lawsuits and IP contests alleging copyright and payment issues.
How does Wikipedia plan to benefit from AI deals?
Speaking to AP from Johannesburg, South Africa, Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander said the bulk of Wikipedia's funding comes from 8 million individual donors. Iskander will step down from her role on 20 January, with Bernadette Meehan set to take her place.
“But our infrastructure is not free, right? It costs money to maintain servers and other infrastructure that allows both individuals and tech companies to draw data from Wikipedia,” she pointed out.
Wales added, “They're not donating in order to subsidise these huge AI companies. They're saying, ‘You know what, actually you can’t just smash our website. You have to sort of come in the right way’.”
The foundation also sees benefits for editors and users as Wales outlined a strategy to use AI tools to reduce tedious tasks, such as updating dead links and finding additional sources online.
There is also a search benefit: migrating from the traditional keyword method to chatbot suggestions instead. Wales explained: “You can imagine a world where you can ask the Wikipedia search box a question and it will quote to you from Wikipedia. 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.”
Jimmy Wales says Elon Musk's Grokipedia not a ‘real threat’
Commenting on Elon Musk's Grokipedia, which was launched in 2025 amid criticism from the world's richest man that Wikipedia is “filled with propaganda”, Wales said he does not consider Grokipedia a “real threat” because it's based on large language models (LLMs).
“Large language models aren’t good enough to write really quality reference material. So a lot of it is just regurgitated Wikipedia. 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 stated.
He added that his criticism was not directed only at Grokipedia, but rather “just the way” LLMs work.
(With inputs from AP)