Wikipedia makes Big Tech companies pay with new AI licensing deals

Wikipedia unveiled new business deals with a long list of artificial intelligence companies as it marked its 25th anniversary.

The online crowdsourced encyclopedia revealed on January 15 that it has signed agreements with major AI companies including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Perplexity, Microsoft and France’s Mistral AI, as highlighted in an article by AP.

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 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 Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the site, said though it did not provide financial or other details.

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.

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 AP 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.

By Nazrin Sadigova