Apple reportedly wants to pay news publishers every time Siri AI uses their stories

Apple is negotiating with news publishers to feed current news into the new Siri AI, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company is proposing multiyear deals where publishers get paid each time Siri actually uses their content, and it has reportedly discussed a possible nine-figure budget for the program.

No publishers are named yet, and nothing is signed. The proposed payment model differs from most current AI licensing deals.

Pay per use, not a flat fee

Most AI licensing deals work like a subscription: the AI company pays a set annual fee for broad access to a publisher’s archive and gets to use it however its products need. Apple’s proposal flips that into something closer to a royalty. If Siri pulls from a publisher’s reporting to answer a question, that publisher earns money on that use.

Siri AI answering a sourced question on an iPhone

For publishers, that could be a better deal than a flat fee if Siri takes off across Apple’s billions of devices, or a worse one if people rarely ask Siri about the news. Either way, it ties the payout to real usage instead of a number negotiated up front.

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Apple already licenses publisher content through Apple News+, and some of its earlier publisher agreements included rights to use content for AI training. These new talks are about something different: live access to current reporting, so Siri can answer questions about what is happening right now instead of leaning on stale training data.

Earlier news-summary errors explain Apple’s caution

Apple has already learned what happens when its AI gets the news wrong. In late 2024, Apple Intelligence notification summaries rewrote headlines into things publishers never said, including a false BBC summary that claimed a suspect had shot himself. Apple pulled AI news summaries entirely and only brought them back with iOS 26, more than a year later, with warnings attached.

Direct access would let Siri answer news questions from licensed reporting and identify the source instead of relying only on its training data.

Siri AI arrives this fall in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 as a chat-style assistant with its own app, after repeated delays pushed the Gemini-powered overhaul back. Access to current reporting would help it answer “what happened today” questions with named sources and fewer factual errors.