Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are paying up for ‘enterprise’ access to Wikipedia

Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI have joined Google in paying the Wikimedia Foundation for access to its projects, including Wikipedia’s vast collection of articles. The Wikimedia Foundation announced the news as part of Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary on Thursday.

The partnerships are part of Wikimedia Enterprise, an initiative launched in 2021 that gives large companies access to a premium version of Wikipedia’s API for a fee. Lane Becker, the Wikimedia Foundation’s senior director of earned revenue, tells The Verge that the program offers a version of Wikipedia “tuned” for commercial use and AI companies. “We take feature requests, we build features and functionality, and sort of try to structure the data in ways that support what these companies’ needs are,” Becker says.

The Wikimedia Foundation says Microsoft, Perplexity, and Mistral AI joined the Enterprise program “over the past year.” Though the company lists Meta and Amazon as “existing” partners, this is the first time they’ve been announced publicly. The funds collected as part of Wikimedia Enterprise go toward supporting the nonprofit’s projects, which Becker says can help it establish a more sustainable business.

“It is in every AI company’s best interest to support the long-term sustainability of Wikipedia, because Wikipedia and all the other projects that we support are so core to their business,” Becker says. “Getting to a new sustainable equilibrium with these new companies is critical for our continued existence, but for their continued existence as well.”