Wikipedia seals AI licensing pacts with Microsoft, Meta and Perplexity as it turns 25

Marking its 25th year, Wikipedia struck licensing deals with Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity and Mistral AI, expanding a push to make AI companies pay for high-volume, fast access to its data. The Wikimedia Foundation, which signed Google in 2022, says bot traffic from AI scraping has surged as human visits fell 8%, straining infrastructure funded largely by 8 million individual donors. Founder Jimmy Wales endorsed AI training on Wikipedia’s “human-curated” content but said developers should cover their share of the site’s costs; the group is also weighing AI tools to cut editorial drudge work and improve search. Leadership is shifting as CEO Maryana Iskander exits Jan. 20, with Bernadette Meehan set to take over, while Wikipedia navigates political criticism and competition from AI products built on its corpus. Financial terms of the new agreements weren’t disclosed.

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