Wikipedia intends to make some money from AI scraping its website

Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon are the latest companies to participate in Wikimedia Enterprise.

By Drew Gillis  |  January 15, 2026 | 12:18pm
Image via Wikipedia
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Wikipedia intends to make some money from AI scraping its website

If you can’t beat ’em, you can at least get ’em to pay you for your work. Wikipedia announced today—on what is its 25th birthday—that it has begun partnerships with Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon in what Reuters calls “a major step up in the non-profit’s ability to monetize tech firms’ reliance on its content.” The idea is that the AI searches are already constantly scrubbing Wikipedia for its data, and now Wikipedia can get some remuneration for it. 

Wikipedia has already had a partnership with Google since 2022, and signed on Mistral AI and Perplexity over the past year. All of the various AI models training on Wikipedia’s pages have come to cost the non-profit money as they drive up demand on its servers, leading them to launch Wikimedia Enterprise, which offers tech companies access to its work for training.  “Wikipedia is a critical component of these tech companies’ work that they need to figure out how to support financially,” Wikimedia Enterprise President Lane Becker told Reuters. “It took us a little while to understand the right set of features and functionality to offer if we’re going to move these companies from our free platform to a commercial platform … but all our Big Tech partners really see the need for them to commit to sustaining Wikipedia’s work.”

Like much of the internet, Wikipedia has had brushes with AI in the past, both with people uploading slop to the free encyclopedia and an experiment with generating AI summaries at the top of articles. (That was paused after significant backlash from Wikipedia editors.) Hopefully the new arrangement helps the site remain one of the few good ones left on the internet. 

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