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Wikipedia Pivots to Paid Licensing as AI Companies Strain Resources
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia, is implementing licensing agreements with major Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies, including Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon. This shift comes as AI firms increasingly rely on WikipediaS data for training their models, leading to notable strain on Wikipedia’s infrastructure and a decline in direct user traffic.The move represents a fundamental change in how the “free knowledge” repository sustains itself in the age of AI.
The Rising Cost of “Free” Knowledge
For years, AI companies have been scraping Wikipedia content on a large scale to fuel the development of their AI models. This practice has dramatically increased bandwidth consumption. In April 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation reported a 50% surge in bandwidth usage for multimedia content since January 2024, with bots accounting for 65% of the most resource-intensive requests – despite representing only 35% of total page views.
Compounding the issue, updated bot-detection systems revealed that a significant portion of website traffic previously attributed to human
