Wikimedia to sell priority API access to AI companies; content stays free

The Wikimedia Foundation is offering paid, enterprise-grade API access that gives AI companies priority access to Wikipedia’s data, and the foundation says the site’s content remains freely available. An update on January 16, 2026 corrected earlier wording that implied these deals licensed Wikipedia’s content; companies are paying for enterprise-grade API access.

The move follows years of rising infrastructure costs as AI firms and other bots scraped Wikipedia at scale. In April 2025 the foundation reported multimedia bandwidth use had grown 50 percent since January 2024, and that bots made 65 percent of the most expensive requests despite producing just 35 percent of pageviews.

By October it disclosed that human traffic to Wikipedia had fallen about 8 percent year over year after updates to bot-detection systems revealed many apparent human visitors were automated scrapers. The foundation has warned the traffic decline threatens the reader-to-editor-and-donor feedback loop that has sustained Wikipedia, and it says many AI chatbots and search engine summaries use Wikipedia content without sending readers to the site.

Key Topics

Tech, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia, Api Access, Ai Companies, Automated Scrapers