The Wikimedia Foundation has announced commercial agreements with major tech companies such as Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI. The companies will receive paid, comprehensive access to human-curated Wikipedia content via the Wikimedia enterprise service. These partnerships mark a shift from informal scraping, i.e., the automated reading and extraction of data, to structured API access that supports the training of large AI models and other AI tools.
The content remains freely available under a Creative Commons license, but the new revenue helps finance the infrastructure and cover rising usage costs. Google and smaller providers are already part of this program, which is being expanded in parallel with Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary.