Apple Negotiates Pay-Per-Use News Deals for Siri AI After Fake News Fiasco

Apple in talks to pay publishers to provide Siri with current news: report

Apple is in talks to pay publishers to use their content to power the upcoming Siri AI, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. The tech giant has reached out to publishers in recent months about using their content to provide Siri with access to current news and information. Apple has proposed a variable compensation model that would pay publishers when their content is used, rather than through a fixed licensing fee. This marks a departure from the standard industry practice of guaranteed fees, which are generally tied to broad access to content, rather than a pay-as-you-go model. Apple has considered a nine-figure budget for the payments, the report says. Apple did not immediately respond to TechCrunch's request for comment. The discussions come as Apple has been working to significantly enhance Siri, years after promising users a smarter and more capable AI assistant. Siri AI is expected to roll out later this year.

Siri AI Needs Access to the News. Here's How Apple Plans to Pay for It

Apple's Siri upgrade is bringing some long-overdue AI capabilities to the voice assistant, but the company may not be done yet. The company is reportedly in talks with multiple publishers to use their content to keep Siri up to date on current news and events. Content deals between AI companies and publishers aren't new. OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and others have all signed similar deals with major publications to train their AI models, make them provide accurate real-time information, or, in some cases, both. Apple's approach is slightly different, The Wall Street Journal reports. Instead of paying a guaranteed fee, it is proposing a multi-year, variable compensation plan that pays publishers every time Siri fetches a response from their website. Sources tell the Journal that Apple is quoting a nine-figure budget for this program, but the deals might not include AI training rights. Apple has struck deals with news platforms before. For its News+ service, which launched in 2019 and gave users access to premium newspapers and magazines for a monthly fee, Apple reportedly paid publishers 50% of the subscription fee, which was $9.99 per month at launch but is now $12.99 per month. It's also faced some setbacks. Last year, Apple was forced to pause Apple Intelligence-powered notification summaries for news apps after the feature was caught spreading fake news. It returned months later with the fourth iOS 26 developer beta. The Journal's report arrives at a time when AI companies are being sued left, right, and center for using copyrighted content without authorization. For Apple, the timing is a bit more significant, as it's poised to deliver the Siri AI capabilities it has long promised. Siri AI is currently available via the public betas for its operating systems; stable versions are expected next month.

Apple is reportedly turning to publishers for help with Siri AI - Engadget

The company appears to be trying to secure access to new content and other information. Apple is in negotiations with news publishers to use their content to bolster Siri AI, according to The Wall Street Journal. In recent months, the company has reportedly reached out to media companies to propose new, multi-year deals that would allow it to use their content to deliver current news and other information though its redesigned personal assistant. Siri AI is expected to be released with iOS 27 when it becomes available to the public sometime later this year. The Journal did not reveal the specific publishers Apple reached out to, but did note the company has proposed structuring payments around a variable compensation plan, which would see it pay those organizations when their content is used. By contrast, most large AI labs like OpenAI have typically offered guaranteed fees in exchange for broad access. According to the The Journal, Apple has paid publishers for access to their content in the past as part of earlier agreements that saw the company secure AI training rights. The move comes as Apple prepares to release Siri AI to the public. The company first anounced the redesigned assistant at WWDC 2024, before it promptly went missing for two years and resurfaced at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference. Apple partnered with Google to distill the company's Gemini models for Siri AI. In Engadget's early testing of Siri AI, the digital assistant was a major improvement over the version most consumers have access to right now, but it was hard not to feel like Apple still has a lot of catching up to do. The company clearly recognizes it has more work to do before it can call its work on Siri complete.

Apple Siri publisher deals would pay per use, not per year

Apple is discussing multiyear deals that would pay news publishers each time Siri uses their reporting, with a possible nine-figure budget. The Apple Siri publisher deals would break with an industry that pays guaranteed fees for broad access. Alexandra Bruell reported the talks for the Wall Street Journal on 12 August, citing people familiar with the matter. Apple has approached publishers over recent months. The content would give Siri AI access to current news and information, the kind that changes hour by hour. Apple declined to comment to the Journal. It did not respond to TechCrunch either. The structure is the story Apple has proposed variable compensation. Publishers would receive payment when their content is used, rather than a fixed licensing fee. That inverts the norm. Standard deals between large AI companies and news organisations set guaranteed fees tied to broad access, the Journal reports. The scale of the difference is easy to see in the deals already signed. News Corp's agreement with OpenAI was reported by Variety as potentially worth more than $250m over five years. Amazon agreed to pay the New York Times between $20m and $25m a year, Engadget reported last year. Both are floors, paid whether or not anyone reads the content. Pay-per-use has no floor. A publisher whose reporting Siri rarely surfaces earns rarely, and one that dominates a news cycle earns more that month. The nine-figure budget sets the ceiling for the whole programme rather than for any single title. Apple has not said how it would count a use, and that definition is where the money lives. Apple has been here before The company already pays publishers. Apple News+ launched in 2019 and has provided meaningful revenue for a handful of news and magazine titles, though some have since pulled out. It has also bought content for AI specifically. In December 2023 the New York Times reported that Apple had discussed multiyear deals worth at least $50m with Condé Nast, NBC News and IAC. The right it wanted was to train on their archives. The Journal says earlier Apple deals included AI training rights. This round is different in what it buys, because training on an archive is not the same as answering a question about this morning. The last time Apple mixed AI and news The precedent is not encouraging, and every publisher in these talks knows it. Apple Intelligence shipped in late 2024 with a feature that summarised news notifications. It rewrote alerts inaccurately, and it attributed the results to the outlets whose alerts it had compressed. One summary said the BBC had reported that the suspect in the killing of a US insurance executive had shot himself. He had not. Another said the BBC had announced that Rafael Nadal came out as gay, and described him as Brazilian. He is Spanish. Others had a darts player winning a final nobody had played yet. Two more put an arrest in the New York Times and a sacking in the Washington Post, neither of which had happened. ProPublica editor Ken Schwencke flagged the quality problem in November 2024, Gizmodo noted this week. Apple suspended the feature for news apps in January 2025 after publisher complaints. The summaries returned in July 2025 carrying a red warning about accuracy. That warning is still there. What Siri AI actually is now The assistant Apple wants to feed is new. Siri AI arrived at WWDC in June, rebuilt on a custom Google Gemini model with 1.2 trillion parameters. It runs on three tiers. Simple tasks stay on the device, moderate ones go to Private Cloud Compute, and heavy reasoning routes to Google Cloud. It is in beta now, with general release expected this autumn alongside the next iPhone. Retrieving current web information was one of the capabilities Apple demonstrated. That capability is what the publisher money is for. An assistant that cannot answer what happened today is an assistant people stop asking. The European asterisk None of this reaches EU iPhones. Apple said on 8 June that it could not ship Siri AI in the EU with iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. It blamed the Digital Markets Act. Mac and Vision Pro users in the EU do get it. Apple Watch users do not, because the watch needs a paired iPhone running the feature. Craig Federighi put the blame on Brussels. Regulators' "refusal to engage constructively" means "we do not currently have a timeline", he said. The desk covered that second delay when Apple announced it. The Commission's position is that Apple's proposed safeguards do not meet the interoperability requirements. So a pay-per-use programme rewards publishers in proportion to queries on devices most Europeans cannot use for this. European titles are not excluded from signing, but the largest pool of paying queries sits outside the EU. The fight this lands in Publishers are split on whether to sign at all. News Corp and Axel Springer have deals with OpenAI, while the New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over the use of its reporting. The infrastructure is moving too. Cloudflare set a September deadline for AI crawlers to pay publishers or be blocked by default. The reason any of this is urgent shows up in the traffic. Google's AI Overviews cut publisher clicks by 58 per cent before Google started adding features to send some back. Europe is arguing the same question in court. Denmark intervened in a Court of Justice case over how Belgium applies publishers' rights under EU copyright law. Two disclosures worth stating The Journal broke this story about a company its owner does business with. News Corp has a commercial agreement to supply news through Apple services, as the Journal itself notes, and the Journal was among the first Apple News+ participants. Mashable, which also covered the talks, carries its own disclosure. Its parent Ziff Davis sued OpenAI in April 2025 over the use of its copyrights. Neither fact makes the reporting wrong. Both are the shape of a beat where nearly every outlet covering AI licensing is also negotiating it. What would settle it Three things, and none of them is a press release. The first is which publishers sign, because a deal without a wire service or a national daily buys Siri very little. The second is whether Apple publishes usage data. Pay-per-use is only auditable if the publisher can see the count. The third is whether anyone follows. If pay-per-use spreads, the guaranteed floor that News Corp and the New York Times negotiated becomes the exception rather than the market rate.

Apple to Reportedly Take Another Stab at Mixing AI and News. We Haven't Forgotten Last Time's Disaster

Siri AI doesn't suck, which is a minor miracle. But new reporting from the Wall Street Journal suggests Apple is feeling itself so much that it's in talks with news publishers to form licensing deals that allow it to deliver up-to-the-minute information via its AI-powered voice assistant. If reading this gives you a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach but you can't remember why, it's because Apple tried something similarly ambitious, and the ensuing disaster left a big scar. Apple's news notification summaries now carry a big, red warning because of what happened in late 2024 and early 2025. The incident you probably remember was the time Apple's news notification summaries claimed that the BBC had reported that accused insurance executive assassin Luigi Mangioni had shot himself. He hadn't. The issue was that Apple Intelligence had shipped with a notification summaries feature. Apple Intelligence was using AI to condense texts and other communications like Slack messages, but it was also taking the liberty of compressing the personalized news alerts an individual user was seeing on their phone -- ostensibly into bite-sized nuggets that could be consumed at a glance. But it was sometimes mangling the truth. Worse: it was claiming that credible news outlets were the ones mangling the truth. The quality issue that led to these false alerts appears to have been spotted by ProPublica editor Ken Schwencke in November of 2024, a few weeks after the official release of Apple Intelligence. Reviews of notification summaries were not great, but over the next to months, the feature slowly turned into a viral catastrophe. Apple Intelligence claimed at one point that the BBC had announced that tennis legend Rafael Nadal had come out as gay, and in the process, it made the arguably more consequential mistake of saying he was Brazilian. He is Spanish. It claimed that the BBC had said darts player Luke Littler had won a final that hadn't yet been played. It claimed that the New York Times was saying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested -- he hasn't to this very day, to the consternation of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. In what may have been the last such incident, it claimed that the Washington Post was reporting that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had been fired, which was wrong; and simultaneously that Pam Bondi and Marco Rubio had been confirmed by the Senate as Attorney General and Secretary of State respectively, something that had not yet happened. Then, astonishingly, the next day, it claimed that the Washington Post had reported that the Senate had confirmed Marco Rubio's Senate Replacement, which isn't how the Constitution works. The governor of Florida simply picked Rubio's replacement. The following day, Apple temporarily shut down the feature. It's since been re-added, but with the aforementioned red-text warning. So with all that in mind, it's fascinating that Apple is reportedly going around to publishers not even two years after all this happened, apparently with the aim of making expensive, long term deals that will feed their news content into Siri. Citing "people familiar with the matter" the Journal says Apple, which declined the Journal's request for comment, is looking to make "multiyear" content deals, which would pay different amounts depending on how much a publisher's content is served to users. The Journal says Apple is working with a "possible nine-figure budget" for this new form of AI-powered news.

Report: Apple seeks publisher deals to give Siri AI better access to current events

The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple has been pursuing content deals worth up to nine figures to improve Siri AI's access to current news and information. Here are the details. Apple seeks deals with publishers for Siri AI In a report published today, The Wall Street Journal says that Apple has been reaching out to publishers to secure multiyear deals that would provide Siri AI with access to current events and information. From the report: Apple has proposed a variable compensation plan, with payments made to partner publishers when their content is used, some of the people said. The company has discussed a possible nine-figure budget for the payments, they said. Apple's move comes as publishers increasingly choose between fighting AI companies in court and licensing their content to them. The New York Times, for instance, is currently suing OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged unauthorized use of their work to train AI models, while publishers including News Corp and Axel Springer have instead struck content deals with the maker of ChatGPT. Reddit has also taken both approaches, striking a deal (which is currently under review) with Google in 2024 reportedly worth about $60 million per year to license its content for AI training, while separately suing Anthropic and Perplexity over alleged unauthorized scraping of its data. Back to the Journal's report, it notes that such deals wouldn't be a first for Apple, as the company currently teams up with publishers for Apple News+, and has struck deals that included rights to use publishers' content for its own AI training. The WSJ reached out to Apple for comment, but the company declined. To read the WSJ's full report, follow this link. Worth checking out on Amazon

Apple's Siri news fix has a big Gen Z problem

Apple wants Siri AI to finally have something it's been missing: information that's actually current and reliable The Wall Street Journal says Apple is talking to publishers about multi-year deals. The idea is to let Siri AI use their reporting to answer questions about what's happening now. Perhaps it will look something like Gemini AI is already doing with Google, but Apple's budget for this but be even bigger. According to the WSJ report, possibly hundreds of millions, depending on how much of each publisher's work Siri ends up using. Actually paying publishers is a shift from the usual scrape-now, argue-later routine that's defined most of the AI industry so far. It means Siri might finally get real reporting and fewer confidently wrong answers. Apple is betting on a new model of the news business Apple seems to be betting on a version of the news business that doesn't really match how most people get their information anymore. For instance, Siri can't just parrot whatever's trending on X, TikTok or YouTube. Apple needs sources with editors, corrections and someone who actually takes the blame when things go wrong. The company has already learned how quickly AI-generated news can create trouble. Apple suspended notification summaries for news and entertainment apps in early 2025 after Apple Intelligence produced inaccurate summaries of publishers' alerts. In one widely reported example, it falsely made it appear that the BBC had reported that murder suspect Luigi Mangione had shot himself. Licensing real reporting means Apple can control what Siri says and how it uses that info. Publishers get paid, which matters now that AI answers are making it less likely anyone clicks through to the original version story. For questions such as "What did the Federal Reserve announce?" If you ask Siri what the Fed did today or what's up with the election, it's safer to pull from vetted sources than to let Siri riff on whatever's blowing up on online.er since audiences are finding news somewhere else. People are consuming news through multiple outlets How people actually find news has changed a lot faster than the newsrooms making it. The Reuters Institute's 2026 Digital News Report found that social media and video networks have overtaken publishers' websites and apps as a source of news across many of the markets it studied. Globally, 30% of respondents now describe social and video platforms as their main source, up from 22% five years ago. The difference is even sharper among younger people. More than half of 18- to 24-year-olds said social media, video platforms and AI chatbots were now their primary route to news. For people between 18 and 34, the use of news websites and apps has fallen so quickly that those properties no longer represent the leading source for any age group globally. Where those users place their attention has changed as well. A separate Reuters Institute study of young news audiences found that 51% of social media news users between 18 and 24 pay the most attention to individual creators and personalities. Only 39% said the same about traditional news organizations or journalists. The pattern is visible in the U.S., too. Pew Research Center found that 38% of Americans ages 18 to 29 regularly get news from influencers, compared with 8% of people 65 and older. More than three-quarters of those younger users said they usually encountered that coverage rather than deliberately searching for it. Even the safest Siri could still feel out of step None of this means Apple should train Siri to repeat a podcaster's speculation or treat an unverified video as established fact. Independent reporting and creator commentary vary enormously in quality, and social platforms can spread false information much faster than a newsroom can correct it. But the danger is at the other extreme. If Siri leans too hard on several of big publishers, the answers might be technically correct but still miss the point. It could repeat what's in the official record and skip the interviews, eyewitness clips, niche newsletters and independent reporting that actually make for good reporting. Without a doubt, this will make Sirie end up sounding disconnected with a summary that can't confirm the difference between firsthand reporting, analysis and random speculation. All of which, real human reporters can typically discern. So while publishers might be able to give Siri a solid base, but they can't cover the whole news ecosystem on their own. Amanda's take As a journalist, I want publishers to be paid when AI companies use their reporting. Apple licensing credible news is far better than Siri scraping articles, stripping away the context and answering without sending anything back to the people who did the work. But I don't think established publishers alone reflect how people understand the news anymore. I read traditional reporting, but I also listen to podcasts, follow independent journalists and watch firsthand videos that may capture a story before a major newsroom catches up. Younger iPhone users are even more likely to piece together what's happening that way. That doesn't mean Siri should treat every viral post as fact. It means Apple needs a smarter system than a short list of approved publishers. Siri should be able to begin with what has been verified, clearly identify what remains unconfirmed and acknowledge credible reporting or firsthand accounts emerging elsewhere. Apple is right to make reliability the foundation. But if it plays things too safely, Siri could end up giving accurate answers that still feel a day behind the conversation. The Siri I want would not force me to choose between established journalism and the people documenting events in real time. It would help me understand which claims are confirmed, where they came from and why people are talking about them. Paying publishers is a strong start, but it cannot be Apple's entire answer to how news works now. Follow Tom's Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Subscribe to Tom's Guide on YouTube and follow us on TikTok. Finally, you can visit our dedicated Tom's Guide Savings Squad hub for expert help on getting the best products for less.

Apple in Talks to Pay Publishers for News Content to Power Siri AI

Apple has approached publishers to establish content deals that would give Siri AI access to current news and information, reports The Wall Street Journal. Apple is proposing multiyear agreements where publishers would receive payment when their content is used, which is different from standard AI deals. Typical deals between AI companies and news organizations have set fees for broad content access. Apple has discussed a nine-figure budget for the payments. The Wall Street Journal says Apple previously inked deals that included AI training rights. Apple has also worked with publishers for its Apple News+ service since 2019, though some publishers were unhappy with the content deals and ended their partnerships. Siri AI is set to launch this fall in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27. Siri AI is a major departure from the prior version of Siri, and Apple has an incentive to ensure accurate news headlines. An iOS 18 notification summary feature turned out to be an embarrassment after Apple Intelligence generated false headlines that misled users. Apple ended up removing news summaries for more than a year while it made improvements.

Apple seeks publisher deals to improve Siri AI

Siri may soon be (finally) able to tell you more about what is happening in the world right now, but Apple could have to pay publishers a lot of money to make that happen. According to an Aug. 12 report by the Wall Street Journal, Apple has approached several news publishers in recent months about giving its forthcoming Siri AI assistant access to their content. The proposed multiyear deals would help Siri answer questions about current events and other information that changes in real time. Apple has reportedly discussed setting aside a nine-figure budget for the partnerships. Its proposed payment structure would compensate publishers whenever their reporting is used, according to the Journal. That differs from many existing AI licensing deals, which typically pay publishers a guaranteed fee in exchange for broader access to their content. It is unclear which publishers Apple has contacted or whether any agreements have been finalized. Apple declined to comment to the Journal. The negotiations come as Apple prepares to roll out a significantly upgraded version of Siri. Siri AI is expected to enter beta later this year, with new capabilities that allow the assistant to understand personal context, recognize what is on a user's screen, and complete actions across apps. Apple already has established relationships with publishers through Apple News+, its paid news subscription service that launched in 2019. The company has also previously paid for access to content through deals that included the right to use publishers' work for AI training, the Journal reported. Apple has also already learned how quickly AI-generated news can go wrong. In late 2024, the company began offering AI-generated notification summaries that sometimes rewrote news alerts inaccurately. Apple eventually disabled the feature for news and entertainment apps following complaints from publishers. The latest talks arrive as news organizations decide how, or whether, to work with the companies building AI products. Publishers, including News Corp and Axel Springer, have signed content deals with OpenAI, while The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over the alleged unauthorized use of its reporting. For publishers, Apple's proposed pay-per-use system would offer another way to make money from the AI products increasingly answering questions that once sent readers directly to news websites. For Apple, it could help ensure that when users ask Siri what is happening right now, the assistant finally has a useful answer. Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable's parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

Apple Seeks Publisher Partnerships to Upgrade Siri AI: Report

Major AI companies offer fixed payments to individual publishers Apple introduced Siri AI, a new version of the voice assistant powered by Apple Intelligence, at WWDC 2026 in June. The new version of the virtual assistant will be available to the public across iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, and visionOS 27 later this year. As we wait for the release, a new report suggests that the Cupertino-based tech company is exploring partnerships with publishers to use their content to improve Siri AI. The deal could help the AI-powered voice assistant answer user questions about current events and information. Apple in Talks With Publishers Over Content Deals As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Apple is discussing new deals with publishers to use their content to deliver current news and information, as part of an effort to improve its AI-powered Siri voice assistant. The company reportedly approached publishers in recent months and proposed multi-year deals which would provide Apple with access to content to help power Siri AI, which is expected to roll out later this year. Citing people familiar with the matter, the report states that the iPhone maker has proposed a variable compensation plan with publishers. The company could offer nine-figure payments to partner publishers when their content is used. The proposed deal, if finalised, would help Siri to answer questions about current events and information. The names of publishers Apple has approached have not been disclosed. Major AI companies offer fixed payments to individual publishers in exchange for broad access to content. Apple's latest move comes as the company is set to make several improvements to Siri. The brand announced a major overhaul to Siri at WWDC 2026. The Siri AI assistant can draw information from apps like Messages, Mail, and Photos and take actions across supported applications. The Siri AI lets users draft an email from scratch or edit and share a set of photos. Siri AI can answer questions related to the content on a user's screen. Siri AI will be released to the public this fall alongside iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, tvOS 27, and visionOS 27.

Apple seeks huge deals to make Siri AI your go to resource for current events - report

Siri AI could become your own personal news service where you can request information about current events Apple is reportedly exploring deals with publishers that would enable its reimagined Siri AI assistant to field questions about current events. According to a Wall Street Journal report this week, Apple is chasing multi-year licensing deals to give Siri AI access to the latest reporting. The report says: "Apple has proposed a variable compensation plan, with payments made to partner publishers when their content is used, some of the people said. The company has discussed a possible nine-figure budget for the payments, they said." One might assume that the Wall Street Journal's "people familiar with the matter" are the people who handle this kind of deal for the Wall Street Journal, or other News Corp publications. If a deal goes through, you could imagine iPhone users being able to ask Siri about election results as they happen, sports scores, natural disasters and other notable current affairs. It'd potentially be akin to a news anchor having a discussion with an on-scene reporter, where follow up questions and context is sought. The reporting suggests that Apple is prepared to spend over $100 million on securing access to this content, which in itself is good news for publishers seeking additional revenue to replace the wholesale theft of traffic via AI chatbots that simply lift whatever has been published to the internet over the last four decades and exploits it without handing over so much as a "click here" let alone any money. As 9to5Mac points out in its reporting, the New York Times is suing Open AI on Microsoft over allegations their reporting was used wholesale to train AI. Apple pays publishers who place their content on Apple News, but the content licensing deals would not cover it being used to communicate with users of an AI chatbot or personal assistant. Apple has not commented on the WSJ story. Siri AI will debut on supported Apple devices with iOS 27 (and the requisite versions for Mac, iPad, Apple Watch and more) later this year, but the feature covered in this report is unlikely to be available at launch.

Apple wants publishers to help make Siri smarter, may pay hundreds of millions: Report

Apple is reportedly discussing new multiyear deals with news publishers. These agreements would grant the iPhone maker access to their content for Siri. The proposed deals involve variable compensation based on content usage. Apple is preparing a major AI upgrade for its Siri voice assistant. Apple is reportedly in discussions with news publishers over new multiyear deals that would give the iPhone maker access to their content to improve its artificial intelligence-powered Siri voice assistant. According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple has approached publishers in recent months as it prepares to roll out a major AI upgrade to Siri later this year. The proposed agreements would allow Apple to use publishers' current news and information to help power the revamped assistant. Also Read: Apple Pay coming to India in October, UPI support may be delayed: Report Apple has proposed a variable compensation model under which participating publishers would receive payments when their content is used, the people said. The company has also discussed a potential budget running into the hundreds of millions of dollars for such payments, the report stated. The proposed arrangement would differ from standard AI content-licensing deals between large technology companies and news organisations. Such agreements typically involve guaranteed fees in exchange for broad access to publishers' content rather than payments based on individual usage. Apple's discussions with publishers come as the company seeks to address longstanding criticism that Siri has been less capable and useful than competing AI assistants. Apple has announced a major Siri upgrade designed to integrate AI more deeply into how users interact with its devices and services. Also Read: Apple Pay and Wallet Services chief Jennifer Bailey is leaving the iPhone maker Apple has previously paid publishers for content access, including agreements that gave it rights to use material for AI training, WSJ said citing people familiar with those arrangements. The company has also worked with publishers through Apple News+, its paid news and magazine subscription service launched in 2019. The Wall Street Journal was among the early participants in Apple News+. News Corp, which owns the Journal, has a commercial agreement to supply news through Apple services. Apple's efforts to use publisher content for AI also come after an earlier setback. In late 2024, the company began testing AI-generated news summaries for users. The feature generated inaccurate headlines, prompting concerns among publishers and leading Apple to disable it.

Apple Discusses Paying Publishers to Improve Siri | PYMNTS.com

Apple has approached publishers in recent months about multiyear agreements that would give the company access to current news and information, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday (Aug. 12), citing people familiar with the discussions. The content would help power an AI-enhanced version of Siri expected to arrive later this year. The proposed payment structure distinguishes the talks from many existing licensing deals between AI companies and news organizations. Those agreements typically provide publishers with guaranteed fees in exchange for broad access to their content. Apple, by contrast, has discussed a variable model that would tie compensation to usage. "The company has discussed a possible nine-figure budget for the payments," the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the talks. That approach could give publishers greater visibility into how often an AI service relies on their reporting. It could also help Apple secure timely, professionally produced information as it tries to make Siri more useful. Apple declined to comment to the Journal. The company has paid publishers for content before. Earlier agreements included AI training rights, according to the report. Apple also began working with publishers on its Apple News+ subscription service in 2019. Some publishers have since left the service, although the arrangements have generated meaningful revenue for several news and magazine companies. The Wall Street Journal was among the first publishers to join Apple News+. News Corp, the Journal's parent company, has a commercial agreement to provide news through Apple services. Accuracy remains a central concern. Apple experimented with AI-generated news summaries in late 2024, but the feature produced inaccurate headlines and prompted complaints from publishers. Apple quickly disabled it. The new talks suggest Apple may address that problem by placing trusted publisher content closer to Siri's answers. For media companies, the commercial implications extend beyond one voice assistant. A usage-based agreement with Apple could become a reference point as publishers negotiate how their work is distributed, credited and compensated across AI services.

Apple in talks to pay publishers for Siri AI content- WSJ By Investing.com

Investing.com -- Apple is in discussions with publishers to secure content licensing deals aimed at improving its AI-powered Siri voice assistant, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. The iPhone maker has contacted publishers in recent months about new multiyear agreements that would give Apple access to content for Siri AI, which is set to launch later this year, the WSJ reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Apple has proposed a variable compensation structure where publishers would receive payments when their content is used. The company has discussed allocating a budget in the nine-figure range for these payments, the WSJ report said. The outreach to publishers comes as Apple works to enhance its voice assistant, which has faced criticism for years over its limited functionality. The company recently announced a major upgrade to Siri that would integrate AI more deeply into Apple products. This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.