The Wikimedia Foundation has issued a direct call for artificial intelligence (AI) companies to cease freely scraping its vast content and instead utilize its paid Wikimedia Enterprise API. This urgent appeal, published in a blog post on November 10, 2025, comes as Wikipedia experiences an 8% year-over-year drop in human page views, a decline attributed to AI chatbots increasingly providing answers that once led users directly to the encyclopedia's pages.
Wikimedia Demands Payment Amid AI Scrutiny
The Foundation emphasized that AI developers are "caught red-handed" scraping content at scale, bypassing official channels. Its leadership asserts that companies training "billion-dollar AI models on our content" must pay for it. This stance isn't solely about revenue; it's a critical move to protect Wikipedia's infrastructure and ensure the sustainability of its non-profit mission, which relies heavily on donations. The organization has upgraded its bot detection systems to counter sophisticated AI bots that attempted to evade detection by mimicking human behavior, particularly during high traffic spikes observed between May and June 2025.
The Impact of AI on Wikipedia's Traffic
The significant decrease in human page views poses a direct threat to Wikipedia's traditional funding model. As AI-powered search results and chatbots increasingly synthesize information, fewer users navigate to the original source, impacting ad impressions and, consequently, donation appeals. This shift underlines a growing tension between the open-access principles Wikipedia embodies and the commercial exploitation of its human-curated data by for-profit AI ventures. In August 2025, the platform even adopted a policy allowing editors to nominate suspected AI-generated articles for speedy deletion, reflecting broader concerns about content integrity.
Wikimedia Enterprise API: The Official Channel
To address these challenges, Wikipedia is urging AI firms to use the Wikimedia Enterprise API, a paid service specifically designed for licensed, high-volume access to its content. This API caters to commercial use, including AI training and large-scale data needs, without overburdening Wikipedia’s public servers.
While specific current pricing details were not extensively publicized in the latest reports, previous disclosures indicate that annual contracts for this service can range from tens of thousands to millions of dollars, depending on usage and scale. Notable clients, including technology giants like Google and Microsoft, have reportedly utilized this paid access in the past. The Enterprise API offers crucial features such as real-time content updates, high reliability, and various opt-in functionalities for customers, providing a stable and legitimate pathway for accessing Wikipedia’s vast repository. It stands as one of the few large-scale, real-time, and officially licensed sources of encyclopedic data available for commercial AI use.
Safeguarding Infrastructure and Mission
This strategic shift by Wikipedia reflects a broader industry trend where content providers are demanding fair compensation from AI companies for the data used to train their models. Industry analysts have pointed out the increasing value of high-quality, human-curated data in the competitive AI arms race. While some AI developers acknowledge that the scale and commercial stakes of modern AI necessitate new licensing models, user reactions remain mixed, with some supporting Wikipedia's right to compensation and others voicing concerns about potential impacts on the internet's openness. The Wikimedia Foundation's enhanced bot detection and anti-scraping measures further highlight the escalating technical battle to protect its content.