Apple is in talks with news publishers to pay them for content that would feed a smarter, more current version of Siri, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The deals being discussed would compensate publishers each time their content is actually used by the AI, a structure that departs from the flat licensing fees most AI companies have negotiated with media organizations so far.
Apple has reportedly set aside a nine-figure budget for these agreements and is pursuing multiyear contracts.
The company has previously signed deals with publishers that included AI training rights, and it has maintained content partnerships through Apple News+ since 2019.
However, that program has had a complicated history with publishers, some of whom eventually walked away over terms they found unsatisfactory.
Burned Before
The push for reliable, real-time news content is directly tied to a high-profile stumble. When Apple rolled out AI-generated notification summaries in iOS 18, the feature began producing fabricated news headlines that were presented to users as factual.
The BBC and other outlets publicly complained after their reporting was misrepresented. Apple pulled news summaries from the feature entirely, and the capability stayed disabled for over a year while the company worked to address the problem. It only returned in iOS 26 beta testing this past July.
That episode gave Apple a concrete reason to pursue licensed, verified news content rather than relying solely on whatever the AI can scrape or synthesize on its own.
Having direct agreements with publishers would give the company more control over the accuracy and currency of the information Siri surfaces.
Siri AI Arrives This Fall
The rebuilt Siri is scheduled to launch this fall alongside iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27. Apple has described it as a substantial overhaul rather than an incremental update, with deeper contextual awareness and the ability to take actions across apps.
A Siri that can accurately pull and summarize current news headlines would be a meaningful part of that pitch, particularly for users who rely on their iPhone as a primary news source.
How many publishers ultimately agree to Apple’s proposed terms remains unclear. The per-use payment model is a different calculation for media companies than a lump-sum licensing arrangement, and some outlets may want guarantees around how their content is attributed or presented within Siri responses before signing on.
