The Wikimedia Basis, the nonprofit group that hosts Wikipedia, desires AI corporations to cease scraping its information to coach AI fashions and to start paying to make use of its Utility Programming Interface as an alternative, the muse mentioned in a blog post on Monday.
Wikimedia says AI corporations want high-quality human-curated info to maintain their fashions working. Wikipedia’s in depth volunteer community of editors ensures that its info stays well-sourced, and its content material is on the market in over 300 languages.
On the identical time, operating Wikipedia is a pricey endeavor. It is at present the seventh-most visited web site on the earth, in accordance with Semrush. It value $179 million to run Wikipedia for the 2023-2024 fiscal year, in accordance with a Wikimedia Basis audit. Wikimedia retains Wikipedia afloat primarily by donations and doesn’t run advertising.
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However AI is altering folks’s analysis habits. As an alternative of researching topics on Wikipedia, individuals are turning to AI to reply their questions. Though Wikipedia is free to make use of, if folks circumvent it by utilizing ChatGPT, they will not see donation requests on the prime of the Wikipedia house web page, and the location may lose cash.
Wikimedia is asking AI corporations to pay to make use of its Enterprise API, which can permit them “to make use of Wikipedia content material at scale and sustainably with out severely taxing Wikipedia’s servers, whereas additionally enabling them to assist our nonprofit mission.”
Representatives for Google, OpenAI, Meta, Perplexity, Anthropic, Microsoft, DeepSeek and xAI did not instantly reply to requests for remark, and a consultant for Wikimedia additionally did not instantly reply to a request for remark.
Google did agree to a deal with Wikimedia in 2022 to commercially entry Wikipedia content material.
Wikimedia’s request comes as on-line content material creators are pushing again towards AI corporations utilizing on-line information with out permission or cost. On-line publishers, equivalent to Penske, the New York Times and News Corp, are suing AI corporations for copyright infringement. Different corporations, such because the Associated Press and Reuters, have signed licensing deals with AI firms.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s mum or dad firm, in April filed a lawsuit towards OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in coaching and working its AI methods.)
In the course of the AI increase, Large Tech shares have soared to stratospheric heights. Nvidia briefly turned the world’s first $5 trillion company late final month, with Microsoft and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, breaking the $4 trillion barrier earlier this 12 months.
