The tech giants - alongside Perplexity and Mistral AI - are joining Google in paying for access to the organisations projects, which includes Wikipedia's collection of articles.

The initiative provides large companies with access to a premium version of Wikipedia's API, which is "tuned" for commercial use and AI firms.

Lane Becker, Wikimedia Foundation’s senior director of earned revenue, told The Verge: "We take feature requests, we build features and functionality, and sort of try to structure the data in ways that support what these companies’ needs are."

Meta and Amazon - both listed as "existing" partners - have been confirmed as members of the programme publicly for the first time, while Microsoft, Perplexity and Mistral AI are said to have joined "over the past year".

Becker noted that AI firms should consider supporting Wikipedia "long-term", and that there is a benefit to both sides.

He added: “It is in every AI company’s best interest to support the long-term sustainability of Wikipedia, because Wikipedia and all the other projects that we support are so core to their business.

“Getting to a new sustainable equilibrium with these new companies is critical for our continued existence, but for their continued existence as well.”

The paid service launched in 2021, with the goal of offering new optjins for companies using its content.

In an essay at the time, the Wikimedia Enterprise team said: "This is about setting up the movement to thrive for decades to come, to weather any storm, and to genuinely stand a chance at achieving the mission first conceived 20 years ago.

“We’re going to need more resources, more partners, and more allies if we are going to achieve the goals implicit in our vision statement.”