India, Nov. 13 -- Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has urged major technology companies, including Google and OpenAI, to start paying for the extensive use of Wikipedia's content in training artificial intelligence (AI) models. Wales said that while Wikipedia's information is freely licensed, the increasing use of its data by AI companies has created a growing financial and technical strain on the non-profit organisation.

Speaking to Reuters, Wales explained that Wikipedia's content forms a major part of the training data used by large language models (LLMs), the same systems that power AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini. However, he added that the surge in automated traffic from AI crawlers is putting stress on the platform's...