The fee of “free” knowledge
The push for paid licensing follows years of rising infrastructure costs as AI corporations scraped Wikipedia content at an industrial scale. In April 2025, the muse reported that bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content had grown 50 percent since January 2024, with bots accounting for 65 percent of the costliest requests to core infrastructure despite making up just 35 percent of total pageviews.
By October, the Wikimedia Foundation disclosed that human traffic to Wikipedia had fallen roughly 8 percent yr over yr after the organization updated its bot-detection systems and discovered that much of what seemed to be human visitors were actually automated scrapers built to evade detection.
The traffic decline threatens the feedback loop that has sustained Wikipedia for 1 / 4 century: Readers visit, some turn out to be editors or donors, and the content ostensibly improves. But today, many AI chatbots and search engine summaries answer questions using Wikipedia content without sending users to the location itself.
Meanwhile, the muse’s own experiments with generative AI have met resistance from the volunteer editors who maintain the location. In June, Wikipedia paused a pilot program for AI-generated article summaries after editors called it a “ghastly idea” and warned it could undermine trust within the platform.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told The Associated Press that he welcomes AI models training on Wikipedia data. “I’m very comfortable personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data since it’s human curated,” Wales said. “I wouldn’t actually need to make use of an AI that’s trained only on X, , like a really offended AI.” But he drew a line at free access: “It’s best to probably chip in and pay to your fair proportion of the fee that you just’re putting on us.”
