Wikipedia Strikes Landmark Deals with AI Giants Amid 25th Anniversary

Wikipedia celebrates its 25th anniversary by announcing new partnerships with major AI companies like Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft. These deals allow AI firms to access and use Wikipedia content, in a move aimed at monetizing the platform while accommodating AI-driven evolution.

On its 25th anniversary, Wikipedia announced significant partnerships with major artificial intelligence companies including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Perplexity, Microsoft, and France's Mistral AI. These agreements come as the crowdsourced encyclopedia seeks to evolve and capitalize on AI technology while maintaining its original ethos of free access to information.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia, revealed that AI giants will pay to access its data, thus offering new revenue streams. This move comes amid rising concerns over AI companies' extensive data scraping from free online information repositories, such as Wikipedia, to train their language models.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales expressed a positive outlook on the integration of AI with Wikipedia's vast repository. He emphasized the potential for AI to reduce editorial workloads and enhance search capabilities while ensuring that AI firms contribute financially to support the platform's infrastructure.

(With inputs from agencies.)