Wikipedia is pursuing additional licensing agreements with major AI companies similar to its existing deal with Google, co-founder Jimmy Wales said Wednesday, as the nonprofit seeks to offset the mounting costs associated with tech firms’ heavy use of its content, reports Reuters.
Speaking at the Reuters NEXT summit in New York, Wales said that while Wikipedia’s articles remain freely accessible to the public, the high-volume automated scraping conducted by AI developers places disproportionate financial strain on the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the site.
“The AI bots that are crawling Wikipedia are going across the entirety of the site… so we have to have more servers, we have to have more RAM and memory for caching that, and that costs us a disproportionate amount,” Wales said.
He noted that Alphabet’s Google has already signed a licensing agreement and that discussions with other companies are underway. Google reached a deal in 2022 to pay for training access to Wikipedia content—data that remains foundational for companies including OpenAI and Meta as they develop large language models.
The foundation primarily relies on small public donations, a funding model Wales emphasized was never intended to subsidize multibillion-dollar commercial AI development. “Wikipedia is supported by volunteers. Those people are donating money to support Wikipedia, and not to subsidize OpenAI costing us a ton of money. That doesn’t feel fair,” he said.
As the world’s largest free knowledge repository, Wikipedia’s push for licensing arrangements raises broader questions about whether AI companies should compensate public and nonprofit sources for the datasets fueling their technologies.
When asked whether Wikipedia might take legal action against AI firms that use its content without paying, Wales replied: “I don’t know. I feel like our ability of soft power to just shame them is probably pretty powerful.”
He added that Wikipedia may consider technical measures—such as Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control—to restrict or manage AI bot access, though he acknowledged this could conflict with the platform’s longstanding commitment to open knowledge. Still, he stressed that the financial burden cannot be ignored.
For more than two decades, the Wikimedia Foundation has operated Wikipedia as a nonprofit supported by volunteer editors and public contributions. Despite its success, the platform continually works to maintain neutrality, particularly during global political or social crises. Wales said that while most editors are not activists, “the community tends to do a pretty good job, even with those circumstances.”
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