Wikipedia tells AI companies to stop scraping data and start paying

The Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that hosts Wikipedia, wants AI companies to stop collecting its data to train AI models and start paying to use its API instead, the foundation said.On the blog post on Monday.

Wikimedia says AI companies need high-quality, human-curated information to keep their models working. Wikipedia’s extensive network of volunteer editors ensures that its information remains well-sourced, and that its content is available in more than 300 languages.

At the same time, running Wikipedia is an expensive endeavor. It is currently the seventh most visited website in the world, according to Samrush. Affect $179 million to operate Wikipedia for the 2023-2024 fiscal yearAccording to Wikimedia Foundation audit. Wikimedia keeps Wikipedia afloat primarily through contributions and contributions Doesn’t show ads.

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But artificial intelligence is changing people’s search habits. Instead of searching for topics on Wikipedia, people are turning to artificial intelligence to answer their questions. Although Wikipedia is free to use, if people circumvent it with ChatGPT, they won’t see donation requests at the top of the Wikipedia home page, and the site could lose money.

Wikimedia is asking AI companies to pay to use its API, which will allow them to “use Wikipedia content widely and sustainably without severely taxing Wikipedia’s servers, while also enabling them to support our non-profit mission.”

Representatives for Google, OpenAI, Meta, Perplexity, Anthropic, Microsoft, DeepSeek, and xAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and a representative for Wikimedia also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Google agreed to a deal with Wikimedia in 2022 To commercially access Wikipedia content.

Wikimedia’s request comes as online content creators push back against artificial intelligence companies using online data without permission or payment. Online publishers, e.g Penskethe New York Times and News Corpis suing AI companies for copyright infringement. Other companies like news agency and Reutershas Signing licensing agreements with artificial intelligence companies.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that it infringed Ziff Davis’s copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

During the AI ​​boom, stocks of major technology companies rose to record highs. It briefly became Nvidia The world’s first $5 trillion company Late last month, with Microsoft and Google’s parent company, Alphabetbreaking the $4 trillion barrier earlier this year.