Wikipedia Makes AI Licensing Deals with More Tech Giants to Allow Content Use

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The host of Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, has announced new licensing agreements with some of the world’s largest technology companies in a post celebrating the free online encyclopedia’s 25th anniversary.

The announcement states: 

“In the AI era, Wikipedia and its human-created and curated knowledge has never been more valuable. Today, Wikipedia is among the top-ten most-visited global websites, and it is the only one to be run by a nonprofit. Its 65 million articles in over 300 languages are viewed nearly 15 billion times every month, and its knowledge power generative AI chatbots, search engines, voice assistants and more. Wikipedia is one of thehighest-quality datasets used in training Large Language Models.” 

Under the deals via the commercial Wikimedia Enterprise platform for large-scale reusers and distributors of Wikimedia project content, tech giants including Ecosia, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Pleias, and ProRata have joined Amazon, Google, and Meta in paying for access to Wikipedia’s data.

The Foundation also says it is “Implementing an AI strategy that puts humans first.” 

AI summaries that appear directly on search engine interfaces often use Wikipedia content as a source, leading to a drop in visits to the website. Decrypt reported in October 2025 that traffic to Wikipedia had dropped by 8% year-on-year as a result, with nearly 60% of all searches on Google resulting in an AI-generated summary.

AI companies have drawn criticism from rights holders for infringing copyright. In December 2025, for example, Disney sent Google a cease and desist letter for copyright infringement, while also signing an agreement with OpenAI to allow the AI giant to use its characters in Sora.