Jimmy Wales says Wikipedia is in talks with several major tech firms to secure licensing deals, arguing that AI companies’ constant scraping of Wikipedia content is creating huge operational expenses for the nonprofit.
“These bots don’t just access a few pages — they scan the whole platform,” Wales said. “That forces us to expand our infrastructure, and it’s costly.”
Although Wikipedia’s content is free for personal use, Wales emphasized that bulk extraction for commercial AI is a separate category that should come with compensation.
Google already has a formal agreement, and more deals are on the way, he confirmed.
He also expressed concern that public donations — the foundation’s primary funding source — are unintentionally subsidizing commercial AI projects.
Wales said if AI firms refused to pay, Wikipedia could rely on reputational pressure or implement technical limits using tools such as Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control.