Wikipedia signs AI deal with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Perplexity on 25th anniversary: Here’s what this means

On the 25th anniversary of its founding on January 15, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that it had signed artificial intelligence agreements with a number of artificial intelligence companies. access point report.

The Wikimedia Foundation is the parent organization of Wikipedia, the online crowdsourced encyclopedia and bastion of free internet knowledge. It was stated that the agreements were signed with leading AI companies such as Amazon, France’s Mistral AI, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Perplexity.

This comes after the nonprofit signed a deal for the first time with Google in 2022 and other smaller players like Ecosia in 2025. access point The report attracted attention.

Why is this important?

Wikipedia, which is free to use, is the ninth most visited website on the internet. There are more than 65 million articles in 300 languages, edited by approximately 2,50,000 volunteers.

These deals with AI companies are important because in 2024, Wikipedia reported an 8% decline in human page views driven by increasingly generative AI (gene AI) providing answers in search engines that do not direct readers to individual websites.

The Wikimedia Foundation later stated that evolving internet trends and advanced bot traffic are reshaping the way people access information globally.

It is also important because access point The report notes that Wikipedia remains among the last surviving bastions of the early internet, whose vision of a free online space has been blurred by the dominance of Big Tech, next-generation AI, and AI chatbots trained on content from the web.

Amid the aggressive data collection methods used by AI developers, including Wikipedia’s vast repository of free knowledge, an increasingly big question arises about who will foot the bill for the AI ​​boom.

Wikipedia’s new AI opportunities: What we know

• Wikipedia’s new deals will help the platform monetize heavy traffic from artificial intelligence companies.
• AI companies pay to access Wikipedia content “at a volume and speed specifically tailored to their needs,” the foundation said.
• No further details were given.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales: ‘Happy AI trains on data chosen by humans’

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he welcomed this turn of events. “I’m personally very happy that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because it’s been chosen by humans. You know, I wouldn’t really want to use an AI that’s only trained on X, like a very angry AI,” Wales said. access point in an interview. He was referring to billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform, which has been rebranded from Twitter and is home to AI bot Grok.

Wales said Wikipedia would not block AI companies but was willing to work with them as long as the compensation was fair. “You (AI companies) should probably contribute and pay your share of the cost you impose on us.” Particularly globally, the aggressive scraping and training of chatbots by AI companies has faced lawsuits and intellectual property contests alleging copyright and payment issues.

How does Wikipedia plan to benefit from AI deals?

To talk access point Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander from Johannesburg, South Africa, said most of Wikipedia’s funding comes from 8 million individual donors. Alexander will leave his post on January 20 and will be replaced by Bernadette Meehan.

“But our infrastructure isn’t free, right? It costs money to maintain the servers and other infrastructure that allows both individuals and tech companies to pull data from Wikipedia,” he noted.

“They’re not donating money to support these huge AI companies. They’re saying, ‘You know, you can’t actually just tear down our website. You’ve got to kind of come around,'” Wales added.

The foundation also sees benefits for editors and users; Wales outlined a strategy to use AI tools to reduce tedious tasks such as updating dead links and finding additional resources online.

There’s also a search benefit: moving away from the traditional keyword method to chatbot suggestions instead. Wales explained: “You can imagine a world where you could ask a question to the Wikipedia search box and it would quote Wikipedia to you. It might respond by saying, ‘Here’s the answer to your question in this article, and here’s the actual paragraph.’ That strikes me as really helpful, and so I think we’ll be moving in that direction as well.”

Jimmy Wales says Elon Musk’s Grokipedia is ‘no real threat’

Commenting on Elon Musk’s Grokipedia, which was launched in 2025 after criticism from the world’s richest man that Wikipedia was “full of propaganda”, Wales said that he did not see Grokipedia as a “real threat” because it was based on large language models (LLM).

“Broad language models aren’t really good enough to write quality reference material. So a lot of it is nothing more than Wikipedia. It’s pretty rambling and rambling a lot of the time. And I think the more obscure you look at, the worse it gets,” he said.

He added that his criticism was not directed solely at Grokipedia, but rather at “exactly” the way Master works.