Wikimedia CEO Demands AI Companies Pay for Content Used in Model Training

Bernadette Meehan, the Wikimedia Foundation's chief executive, has publicly called on artificial intelligence companies to stop unpaid scraping of Wikipedia and instead license content through paid enterprise APIs. Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2026 and via media statements, Meehan emphasized that "we're not asking for charity," but rather seeking financial and attribution support from tech firms whose billion-dollar AI models rely heavily on Wikipedia's human-created, volunteer-maintained content.