Wikipedia, get your money!
Wikipedia has signed licensing deals with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Perplexity, and Mistral AI. The nonprofit that famously rejected advertising is now a paid data supplier to the AI industry.
From: Shelly Palmer
https://shellypalmer.com/2026/01/ai-pays-wikipedia/This is great!
I’d rather see this than what happened with Tailwinds. In short Tailwinds is a library that has become popular in the front-end web sphere. I dislike it because I am a CSS purist but ehh.
Tailwind’s code is open to use by anyone freely. It’s maintained by a staff of paid engineers. They made their money via advertising. However, now with LLMs, humans are not looking at the documentation, BOTs are. Because of this fact, they have laid off a bunch of paid engineers.
So now we’re an interesting situation where factual knowledge is still important. At the end of the day, a human has to curate that. That human should to get paid. Wikipedia is non-profit organization that has survived on donations. With challenges from LLMs and assaults by one Elon Musk it will need more resources and must get them from somewhere. Might as well be big AI tech.
It’s a shame that social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, X, etc. aren’t actually forced to pay for the human content that they consume.
I think the fear now might be bots trying to update Wikipedia pages. How does one control access when changes are coming much faster and more aggresivly? I bet you xAI might be one of the first to do something nefarious and also not pony-up for the benefit that they get from scraping non-slop.