Wikimedia Foundation Urges AI Developers to Use Paid API

The Wikimedia Foundation requested that artificial intelligence developers cease scraping Wikipedia and instead utilize Wikimedia Enterprise, a paid, opt-in API platform. In a blog post published November 10, 2025, the nonprofit stated that the move is necessary to prevent its servers from becoming overburdened and to ensure the sustainability of its funding model and global volunteer editor base.

The organization reported a significant traffic spike during May and June 2025, which it attributed to AI bots attempting to evade detection by mimicking human users. This surge coincided with an 8% year-over-year decline in authentic human page views.

Beyond infrastructure concerns, the foundation is calling for AI developers to provide proper attribution to human contributors when incorporating Wikipedia content into AI outputs to ensure transparency. While the organization has not threatened legal action regarding data scraping, it has previously implemented an AI strategy intended to help editors automate routine workflows and tasks.