Wikipedia Announces New AI Partnerships With Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and More

Wikipedia turned 25 yesterday, and on this occasion, the Wikimedia Foundation announced new AI partnerships with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity. These five companies will join Google and other partners already using Wikipedia content to develop their AI services.

“Over the past year, we have formalized relationships with several companies that rely on Wikimedia project data to power their applications,” the Wikimedia Foundation announced yesterday. “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.”

Wikipedia remains one of the biggest free online sources of information, and all Wikipedia articles are published under a Creative Commons license. However, the Wikipedia Enterprise initiative was launched in 2022 to support the development of the free online encyclopedia. This allows tech companies relying on Wikipedia content, including generative AI chatbots, search engines, and voice assistants, to get high-throughput API access to the encyclopedia.

Google was the “very first customer” of Wikimedia Enterprise,” the Wikimedia Foundation announced back in 2022, and it’s now joined by Big Tech companies and AI startups. While the financial terms of these AI content training deals are unknown, the Wikimedia Foundation, which is financed for the most part with public donations, definitely needs more resources to compensate for the higher operational costs related to AI training.