Wikipedia unveiled new business deals with a slew of artificial intelligence companies on Thursday as it marked its 25th anniversary.
The online crowdsourced encyclopedia revealed that it has signed licensing deals with AI companies including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Perplexity, Microsoft and France’s Mistral AI.
Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of the early internet, but that original vision of a free online space has been clouded by the dominance of Big Tech platforms and the rise of generative AI chatbots trained on content scraped from the web.
Aggressive data collection methods by AI developers, including from Wikipedia’s vast repository of free knowledge, has raised questions about who ultimately pays for the artificial intelligence boom.
The nonprofit that runs the site signed Google as one of its first customers in 2022 and announced other agreements last year with smaller AI players like search engine Ecosia.
The new deals will help
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