Wikipedia inks AI deals with Microsoft, Meta and Perplexity as it marks
25th birthday
[January 16, 2026] By
KELVIN CHAN
LONDON (AP) — Wikipedia unveiled new business deals with a slew of
artificial intelligence companies on Thursday as it marked its 25th
anniversary.
The online crowdsourced encyclopedia revealed that it has signed up AI
companies including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Perplexity, Microsoft and
France's Mistral AI.
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.
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 Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the site, signed
Google as one of its first customers in 2022 and announced other
agreements last year with smaller AI players like search engine Ecosia.
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 foundation said. It did not provide financial or other
details.
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 The Associated Press 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.
The site has become so popular in part because its free for anyone to
use.
“But our infrastructure is not free, right?" Wikimedia Foundation CEO
Maryana Iskander said in a separate interview in Johannesburg, South
Africa.
It costs money to maintain servers and other infrastructure that allows
both individuals and tech companies to “draw data from Wikipedia,” said
Iskander, who's stepping down on Jan. 20, and will be replaced by
Bernadette Meehan.
The bulk of Wikipedia's funding comes from 8 million donors, most of
them individuals.
“They're not donating in order to subsidize these huge AI companies,”
Wales said. They're saying, "You know what, actually you can’t just
smash our website. You have to sort of come in the right way.”
Editors and users could benefit from AI in other ways. The Wikimedia
Foundation has outlined an AI strategy that Wales said could result in
tools that reduce tedious work for editors.
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Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, gestures during an interview with
The Associated Press on the occasion of Wikipedia's 25th anniversary
in London, Monday, Jan. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)
 While AI isn’t good enough to write
Wikipedia entries from scratch, it could, for example, be used to
update dead links by scanning the surrounding text and then
searching online to find other sources.
“We don’t have that yet but that’s the kind of thing that I think we
will see in the future.”
Artificial intelligence could also improve the Wikipedia search
experience, by evolving from the traditional keyword method to more
of a chatbot style, Wales said.
“You can imagine a world where you can ask the Wikipedia search box
a question and it will quote to you from Wikipedia," he said. 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. ”
Reflecting on the early days, Wales said it was a thrilling time
because many people were motivated to help build Wikipedia after he
and co-founder Larry Sanger, who departed long ago, set it up as an
experiment.
However, while some might look back wistfully on what seems now to
be a more innocent time, Wales said those early days of the internet
also had a dark side.
“People were pretty toxic back then as well. We didn’t need
algorithms to be mean to each other,” he said. “But, you know, it
was a time of great excitement and a real spirit of possibility.”
Wikipedia has lately found itself under fire from figures on the
political right, who have dubbed the site “Wokepedia” and accused it
of being biased in favor of the left.
Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Congress are investigating alleged
“manipulation efforts” in Wikipedia’s editing process that they said
could inject bias and undermine neutral points of view on its
platform and the AI systems that rely on it.
A notable source of criticism is Musk, who last year launched his
own AI-powered rival, Grokipedia. He has criticized Wikipedia for
being filled with “propaganda” and urged people to stop donating to
the site.
Wales said he doesn't consider Grokipedia a “real threat” to
Wikipedia because it's based on large language models, which are the
troves of online text that AI systems are trained on.
“Large language models aren’t good enough to write really quality
reference material. So a lot of it is just regurgitated Wikipedia,”
he said. “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 stressed that he wasn't singling out criticism of Grokipedia.
“It’s just the way large language models work.”
Wales say he's known Musk for years but they haven't been in touch
since Grokipedia launched.
“I should probably ping him,” Wales said.
What would he say?
“'How’s your family?' I’m a nice person, I don’t really want to pick
a fight with anybody.”
____
AP writer Mogomotsi Magome in Johannesburg contributed to this
report
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