{"id":518379,"date":"2026-01-15T17:11:16","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T17:11:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/518379\/"},"modified":"2026-01-15T17:11:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T17:11:16","slug":"wikipedia-signs-business-deals-with-top-ai-companies-like-amazon-and-microsoft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/518379\/","title":{"rendered":"Wikipedia signs business deals with top AI companies like Amazon and Microsoft"},"content":{"rendered":"

LONDON (AP) \u2014 Wikipedia unveiled new business deals with a slew of artificial intelligence<\/a> companies on Thursday as it marked its 25th anniversary. <\/p>\n

The online crowdsourced encyclopedia revealed that it has signed up AI companies including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Perplexity<\/a>, Microsoft<\/a> and France\u2019s Mistral<\/a> AI. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Aggressive data collection methods by AI developers, including from Wikipedia\u2019s vast repository of free knowledge, has raised questions about who ultimately pays for the artificial intelligence boom. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

The new deals will help one of the world\u2019s most popular websites monetize heavy traffic from AI companies. They\u2019re paying to access Wikipedia content \u201cat a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs,\u201d the foundation said. It did not provide financial or other details. <\/p>\n

While AI training has sparked legal battles elsewhere over copyright<\/a> and other issues, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he welcomes it. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because it\u2019s human curated,\u201d Wales told The Associated Press in an interview. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t really want to use an AI that\u2019s trained only on X, you know, like a very angry AI,\u201d Wales said, referring to billionaire Elon Musk\u2019s social media platform. <\/p>\n

Wales said the site wants to work with AI companies, not block them. But \u201cyou should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that you\u2019re putting on us.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

The site has become so popular in part because its free for anyone to use. <\/p>\n

\u201cBut our infrastructure is not free, right?\u201d Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander<\/a> said in a separate interview in Johannesburg, South Africa. <\/p>\n

It costs money to maintain servers and other infrastructure that allows both individuals and tech companies to \u201cdraw data from Wikipedia,\u201d said Iskander, who\u2019s stepping down on Jan. 20, and will be replaced by Bernadette Meehan.<\/p>\n

The bulk of Wikipedia\u2019s funding comes from 8 million donors, most of them individuals.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re not donating in order to subsidize these huge AI companies,\u201d Wales said. They\u2019re saying, \u201cYou know what, actually you can\u2019t just smash our website. You have to sort of come in the right way.\u201d <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

While AI isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t have that yet but that\u2019s the kind of thing that I think we will see in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Artificial intelligence could also improve the Wikipedia search experience, by evolving from the traditional keyword method to more of a chatbot style, Wales said. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou can imagine a world where you can ask the Wikipedia search box a question and it will quote to you from Wikipedia,\u201d he said. It could respond by saying \u201chere\u2019s the answer to your question from this article and here\u2019s the actual paragraph. That sounds really useful to me and so I think we\u2019ll move in that direction as well. \u201d <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople were pretty toxic back then as well. We didn\u2019t need algorithms to be mean to each other,\u201d he said. \u201cBut, you know, it was a time of great excitement and a real spirit of possibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wikipedia has lately found itself under fire from figures on the political right, who have dubbed the site \u201cWokepedia\u201d and accused it of being biased in favor of the left. <\/p>\n

Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Congress are investigating alleged \u201cmanipulation efforts\u201d in Wikipedia\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

A notable source of criticism is Musk, who last year launched his own AI-powered rival, Grokipedia<\/a>. He has criticized Wikipedia for being filled with \u201cpropaganda\u201d and urged people to stop donating to the site. <\/p>\n

Wales said he doesn\u2019t consider Grokipedia a \u201creal threat\u201d to Wikipedia because it\u2019s based on large language models, which are the troves of online text that AI systems are trained on.<\/p>\n

\u201cLarge language models aren\u2019t good enough to write really quality reference material. So a lot of it is just regurgitated Wikipedia,\u201d he said. \u201cIt often is quite rambling and sort of talks nonsense. And I think the more obscure topic you look into, the worse it is.\u201d <\/p>\n

He stressed that he wasn\u2019t singling out criticism of Grokipedia. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just the way large language models work.\u201d <\/p>\n

Wales say he\u2019s known Musk for years but they haven\u2019t been in touch since Grokipedia launched. <\/p>\n

\u201cI should probably ping him,\u201d Wales said. <\/p>\n

What would he say? <\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018How\u2019s your family?\u2019 I\u2019m a nice person, I don\u2019t really want to pick a fight with anybody.\u201d <\/p>\n

____ <\/p>\n

AP writer Mogomotsi Magome in Johannesburg contributed to this report<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONDON (AP) \u2014 Wikipedia unveiled new business deals with a slew of artificial intelligence companies on Thursday as…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":518380,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[7060,6229,738,231024,64,66,57,59,65,712,231021,231022,231023,7062,14229,50,256,158,61,103],"class_list":{"0":"post-518379","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-alphabet","9":"tag-amazon-com","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-bernadette-meehan","12":"tag-business","13":"tag-elon-musk","14":"tag-general-news","15":"tag-inc","16":"tag-information-technology","17":"tag-internet","18":"tag-jimmy-wales","19":"tag-larry-sanger","20":"tag-maryana-iskander","21":"tag-meta-platforms","22":"tag-microsoft-corp","23":"tag-news","24":"tag-philanthropy","25":"tag-technology","26":"tag-u-s-news","27":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518379\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/518380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}