Wikipedia Lands AI Deals With Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft

Wikipedia just turned the tables on the AI industry that's been feeding off its content for years.

The Wikimedia Foundation announced Thursday that Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Perplexity, and France's Mistral AI have joined its Enterprise program. These tech giants will now pay for high-speed access to Wikipedia's collection of over 65 million articles.

The timing couldn't be more critical. AI companies have been scraping Wikipedia's free content to train their chatbots, which placed huge strain on the site's servers. Meanwhile, as more people turn to AI for answers instead of visiting Wikipedia directly, donations have struggled to keep pace with rising costs.

"Wikipedia is a critical component of these tech companies' work that they need to figure out how to support financially," said Lane Becker, president of Wikimedia Enterprise. The financial details remain private, but the deals mark a major shift in how Wikipedia funds its mission.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales sees this as simple fairness. Donors give money to support the free encyclopedia, not to subsidize billion-dollar AI companies. "They're not donating in order to subsidize these huge AI companies," Wales told the Associated Press.

The partnerships join existing deals with Google (signed in 2022) and smaller companies like search engine Ecosia. While Wikipedia's content remains free for everyone, the Enterprise program offers faster, bulk access designed specifically for large-scale users like AI chatbots.

The Bright Side

Wales believes these deals benefit everyone, not just Wikipedia's bottom line. Training AI on Wikipedia means chatbots learn from human-curated, fact-checked information instead of unreliable sources. "I'm very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because it's human curated," he explained. "I wouldn't really want to use an AI that's trained only on X, you know, like a very angry AI."

The approach could set a precedent for how AI companies compensate the sources they depend on. As AI reshapes the internet, Wikipedia is proving that even nonprofits can negotiate fair terms with Big Tech.

The real test comes next: how Wikipedia's volunteer editors and writers, who have actively resisted AI content on the platform, will react to these commercial partnerships with the AI industry.