The Wikimedia Foundation has announced a series of new partnerships with artificial intelligence companies that will allow them to use Wikipedia content to train and power their AI models, as the nonprofit seeks to shore up its long-term sustainability amid changing online behavior. The agreements were signed through Wikimedia Enterprise, the foundation’s commercial product designed for large-scale reusers and distributors of content from Wikimedia projects. New signups include Ecosia, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Pleias and ProRata. They join existing partners such as Amazon, Google and Meta.
"In the AI era, Wikipedia and its human-created and curated knowledge has never been more valuable," the foundation said in a statement. "Its knowledge power[s] generative AI chatbots, search engines, voice assistants and more. Wikipedia is one of the highest-quality datasets used in training Large Language Models." It’s the intellectual property equivalent of selling your blood plasma to the local biohacker lab—technically you’re helping humanity, but you also need to pay the hosting bills.
The announcement was made as part of an update tied to Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary. The online encyclopedia is among the top ten most-visited websites globally and is the only one in that group operated by a nonprofit organization. Its more than 65 million articles, published in over 300 languages, are viewed nearly 15 billion times each month, according to the foundation. However, it has warned that traffic patterns are shifting. In October, it said human visits to Wikipedia fell 8% year over year, attributing the decline to users relying on AI-generated summaries rather than visiting the site directly. Nearly 60% of Google searches now end without a click, with on-page responses often powered by Wikipedia content. The foundation is essentially watching its own content become the ghost in the machine, haunting search results while the foot traffic dries up.
The deals come amid a broader debate over how AI companies obtain training data. Large language models are typically trained on vast amounts of online material, a practice that has drawn criticism from authors, publishers and other rights holders who argue that the use of copyrighted works without permission is infringement. Among them, Reddit is involved in several suits with AI companies for the use of its content to train models, although it has reached licensing agreements with the likes of Google. It’s a digital gold rush where the miners are using someone else’s land, and the landowners are finally waking up to the fact that their rocks are worth money.
On Thursday, major book publishers Hachette Book Group and Cengage Group filed a motion to join an existing class action lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of carrying out "historic copyright infringement" to build its Gemini AI platform. The lawsuit alleges Google copied books without proper licenses during its AI training processes. The case was originally filed in 2023 by a group of authors. Major book publishers Hachette Book Group and Cengage Group filed a motion Thursday to intervene in an existing class action lawsuit filed last year against Google, accusing the tech giant of orchestrating "historic copyright infringement" to build its Gemini platform. The complaint filed in California federal court alleges Google "chose to steal a massive body of content from Plaintiffs and the Class to train its AI model" rather than obtain proper licenses, engaging in deliberate infringement... OpenAI faces a similar case from plaintiffs including "Game of Thrones" writer George R.R. Martin. It seems the "AI ate my homework" defense isn't holding up in court.
Entertainment companies are also pressing the issue. In mid-December, Disney sent Google a cease-and-desist letter accusing it of copyright infringement, even as Disney struck a separate licensing deal with OpenAI covering hundreds of characters for AI-generated video. Disney has issued similar notices to other AI firms and is involved in litigation alongside major studios against image-generation company Midjourney. The same month a coalition of writers, actors and technologists launched a new industry group aimed at pushing for enforceable standards governing how AI is trained and used in the entertainment sector. More than 500 prominent figures have backed the initiative, including Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett, Ben Affleck, Guillermo del Toro and Taika Waititi. The message is clear: you can’t just deepfake your way to the box office without paying the piper.
The European Commission launched a formal antitrust investigation Tuesday into whether Google breached EU competition rules by using web publisher and YouTube content to power its artificial intelligence services without fair compensation or consent. "The Commission will investigate to what extent the generation of AI Overviews and AI Mode by Google is based on web publishers' content without appropriate compensation for that, and without the possibility for publishers to refuse without losing a..." The European Commission has also opened a formal antitrust investigation into whether Google violated EU competition rules by using publisher and YouTube content to power its AI services without fair compensation or consent. The EU regulators are basically asking the tech giant to show its receipts, and it looks like the cash register is empty.
Whether copyright holders will ultimately find recourse isn’t certain. Federal judges in the U.S. have recently delivered partial victories to Meta and Anthropic, ruling that their use of copyrighted books to train AI models constituted fair use, while criticizing the companies for maintaining permanent libraries of pirated works. It’s a legal gray area that’s less a settled debate and more a high-stakes poker game where the pot is the future of creative ownership.
A viral post featuring a video reportedly made with Kling AI’s 2.6 Motion Control took social media by storm this week as a clip by Brazilian content creator Eder Xavier showed him flawlessly swapping his face and body with those of Stranger Things actors Millie Bobby Brown, David Harbour, and Finn Wolfhard. The videos have spread widely across social platforms and have been viewed more than 14 million times on X, with additional versions posted since. The clips have also drawn the attention of... everyone who thought their likeness was their own. The uncanny valley just got a new zip code.
Chinese tech giant Baidu just updated its state-of-the-art AI model—and it’s apparently pretty good. The company's ERNIE-5.0-0110 scored 1,460 points on LMArena's Text leaderboard, landing at #8 globally and becoming the sole Chinese model to crack the platform's top 10. It ranked ahead of OpenAI's GPT-5.1-High and Google's Gemini-2.5-Pro. ERNIE v4.0 was released in 2023. ERNIE 5.0 also claimed the #2 spot globally for mathematical reasoning, trailing only the unreleased GPT-5.2-High. The AI arms race is officially a three-horse sprint, and the new contender just kicked dust in the face of the established favorites.
