The founder of the platform says large language models have been ‘hammering’ Wikipedia’s servers and AI companies should “chip in and pay fair share”.
The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has announced new partnerships with (artificial intelligence) AI tech companies, including Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft.
The deal with Wikipedia is part of its commercial product, Wikipedia Enterprise, which allows the reuse and distribution of Wikipedia’s content to AI companies.
In recent years, the free platform’s infrastructure has faced new pressure as AI uses Wikipedia content to train its data models.
"They've been absolutely hammering our servers. And so we've been encouraging them to sign up for and use our enterprise products so we can give them a feed,” said Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organisation behind Wikipedia, has relied largely on donations from millions of individuals.
It says public donations are intended to support free access for readers, not to underwrite commercial AI development.
“They're not donating in order to subsidise 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.”
Automated systems, such as large language models (LLMs), are now among the biggest users of Wikipedia’s content, placing sustained pressure on Wikipedia's servers.
"I would say most data sources, including a tracker that we run, show that people are becoming more reliant on Wikipedia at a time when large language models and a lot of the AI tools are also using Wikipedia to help them be able to provide answers," said Maryana Iskander, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation.
The volunteer-run platform already has an arrangement with Google, which was announced in 2022, and other agreements with smaller AI players such as Anthropic, Perplexity and France's Mistral AI, as well as search engine Ecosia.
Wikipedia’s founder says AI companies relying on the site’s content should contribute more to its upkeep.
“We're trying to work with these companies to basically say, you're using Wikipedia, like everybody needs Wikipedia because it's human-curated knowledge, you should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that you're putting on us," said Wales.
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