Wikipedia turned 25 today, and now, the Wikimedia Foundation is celebrating the Silver Jubilee by joining forces with leading AI companies, formalizing relationships that had long existed in practice but not in payment.
The newly disclosed agreements include major tech players such as Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Perplexity, and France-based Mistral AI, joining Google, which became Wikimedia Enterprise’s first major customer in 2022. Alongside the business updates, the foundation has launched a broader anniversary campaign, including documentaries, experimental formats such as short-form video and games, and a digital “time capsule” reflecting on Wikipedia’s past and future.
“Today, we are announcing Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity for the first time as they join our roster of partners, which includes Google, Ecosia, Nomic, Pleias, ProRata, and Reef Media. All these organizations utilize Wikimedia Enterprise to integrate human-governed knowledge into their platforms at scale. By doing so, they help ensure that the work of our global volunteer community reaches billions of people with the accuracy and transparency that Wikipedia represents,” it announced in an official statement.
Wikipedia’s value to AI developers is difficult to overstate. With more than 65 million articles across over 300 languages, edited and maintained by roughly 250,000 volunteers, the site represents one of the most comprehensive, multilingual, and human-vetted repositories of factual information on the internet. As such, for large language models trained to summarize, reason, and answer questions, Wikipedia has become a core reference layer as well, deeply embedded in AI outputs.
Still, it currently navigates an internet landscape that is different from the one it helped define. Once emblematic of the early web’s promise — open, volunteer-driven, and free to all — Wikipedia now sits at the center of the AI boom, supplying foundational knowledge to some of the most powerful AI systems ever built. While AI companies extract enormous value from Wikipedia’s content, the nonprofit bears the cost of hosting, maintaining, and delivering that data at scale. As AI training intensified, automated bots (many designed to evade detection) began accessing Wikipedia at industrial volumes, driving up bandwidth usage and server costs without contributing to the donation-based funding model that has sustained the platform for decades.
As a result, bots account for a disproportionate amount of the platform’s most resource-intensive requests, placing strain on systems originally designed for human browsing. The result is a paradox – Wikipedia’s influence is expanding through AI, even as its direct relationship with users is dropping. The foundation has reported an approximate 8% decline in human traffic, a drop attributed in part to AI-powered search summaries and chatbots that answer questions directly without sending users to original sources.
The Wikimedia Foundation’s answer to this challenge has been the gradual expansion of Wikimedia Enterprise, a commercial platform designed to serve large-scale data users. Unlike the public APIs intended for developers and researchers, Wikimedia Enterprise offers content delivery optimized for speed, reliability, and volume, all of which are precisely what AI companies require for training and deployment. “Wikipedia is a critical component of these tech companies’ work that they need to figure out how to support financially. 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,” Lane Becker, president of Wikimedia Enterprise, commented on the matter.
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