Wikipedia Licenses Content to Major AI Companies Including Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization behind Wikipedia, has announced new business agreements with several major artificial intelligence (AI) companies, including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Perplexity, Microsoft, and France's Mistral AI. These deals, revealed on Wikipedia's 25th anniversary, aim to monetize the significant traffic from AI firms accessing Wikipedia's extensive content for training purposes.\n\nWikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, expressed personal satisfaction with AI models training on Wikipedia data due to its human-curated nature. He stated a preference for working with AI companies rather than blocking them, but emphasized that these companies should contribute financially for the resources they utilize.\n\nGoogle was among the first companies to sign a deal in 2022, followed by smaller AI players like Ecosia. The new agreements allow AI companies to access Wikipedia content at a volume and speed tailored to their specific requirements. The financial details of these new deals were not disclosed.\n\nWikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander noted that while Wikipedia is free for users, its infrastructure, which supports drawing data by both individuals and tech companies, incurs costs. The organization primarily relies on 8 million individual donors, and Wales highlighted that these donations are not intended to subsidize large AI companies. Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation urged AI developers to pay for access through its enterprise platform, reporting an 8% decrease in human traffic alongside heavy bot activity from AI scrapers taxing its servers.\n\nThe foundation has outlined an AI strategy that could lead to new tools for editors, such as AI-powered systems to update dead links or improve the Wikipedia search experience by moving towards a chatbot-style interface. Wales envisioned a future where users could ask the Wikipedia search box a question and receive direct quotes from articles.\n\nWikipedia has faced criticism from some political figures, including Elon Musk, who launched a rival AI-powered platform called Grokipedia. Wales dismissed Grokipedia as a significant threat, asserting that large language models are not yet capable of producing high-quality reference material, often regurgitating Wikipedia content or generating unreliable information.