Wikipedia seeks more AI licensing deals similar to Google tie-up, co-founder Wales says

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Wikipedia seeks more AI licensing deals similar to Google tie-up, co-founder Wales says

By Deborah Sophia,Krystal Hu
Publication Date: 2025-12-04 00:02:00

  • Wikipedia seeks fair compensation to offset server costs from AI scraping
  • Financial burden highlights how AI models keep training on nonprofit’s data
  • Wikipedia considers technical tools to limit AI crawling

Dec 3 (Reuters) – Wikipedia is working with Big Tech on deals similar to its arrangement with Google, the online encyclopedia’s co-founder, Jimmy Wales, said on Wednesday, in a bid to help the firm monetize AI companies’ heavy reliance on its content.

Speaking in an interview at the Reuters NEXT summit in New York, Wales said that tech companies’ usage of freely available Wikipedia knowledge to train their large language models results in cost surges that Wikipedia’s nonprofit operator must bear.

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“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.

While the content of Wikipedia remains free…

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