Wikipedia's AI Gold Rush: Can Open Knowledge Survive Corporate Partnerships?

Wikipedia is monetizing its AI content reuse strategy through enterprise deals with Big Tech, but is this sustainable for open knowledge? The Wikimedia Foundation has announced partnerships with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity, offering access to its vast repository of human-curated knowledge for AI training.

With 15 billion monthly article views across 300 languages, the platform’s data holds immense value for machine learning models.

Selena Deckelmann, Wikimedia’s Chief Product and Technology Officer, emphasized the human-centric nature of the project:

"Wikipedia shows that knowledge is human, and knowledge needs humans."

Yet the foundation’s new commercial product, Wikimedia Enterprise, is neither free nor open-source—a stark shift for an organization built on open access principles.

For small businesses evaluating AI training data options, the pricing model of Wikimedia Enterprise introduces significant hurdles. While Creative Commons datasets remain freely accessible, enterprise licensing requires infrastructure and financial resources that favor large corporations.

The foundation’s birthday campaign—featuring an AI-focused time capsule and video docuseries—further underscores its pivot toward monetizing knowledge in an AI-driven economy.