Apple wants its upcoming Siri AI upgrade to answer questions about breaking news accurately. And, it seems willing to spend big money to make it happen. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Apple has approached several major news publishers over recent months to secure multiyear licensing deals that would grant Siri AI voice assistant access to current news, live reporting, and fast-changing information.
The company has reportedly discussed setting aside a nine-figure budget—totaling at least $100 million—for these publisher partnerships. The push comes as Apple prepares to roll out its heavily overhauled Siri AI later this year alongside its next major operating system updates, bringing long-promised features like screen awareness, deeper app integration, and personal context understanding.
A unique pay-per-use compensation model
What sets these negotiations apart from typical AI licensing arrangements is how Apple plans to compensate media outlets. The firm is not offering a flat, upfront lump-sum payment for blanket archive access—a model favored by competitors like OpenAI. Instead, Apple is proposing a variable, pay-per-use system. Under this structure, publishers would be paid relative to how often Siri actually uses their content to answer user prompts (via Mashable).
This is a pay-as-you-go model similar to the commercial model Apple already uses for Apple News+. This service distributes revenue based on user engagement. While Apple previously struck bulk agreements with publishers to acquire static datasets for training its AI models, the new initiative focuses on providing real-time, daily reporting directly to users.
Learning from past notification summary blunders
After some early stumbles with software, Apple wants to secure reputable, high-quality news sources for its software platform. A couple of years ago, newsrooms slammed Apple for AI-generated notification summaries that sometimes mangled headlines and generated false summaries. Apple eventually pulled news summaries from its software while engineering teams reworked the feature.
By placing vetted publisher content directly at the core of Siri AI, Apple aims to avoid similar hallucination issues. The timing is also critical for news organizations, which are currently divided on how to handle generative AI. Major outlets like News Corp and Axel Springer have signed licensing deals with OpenAI, whereas organizations like The New York Times have sued OpenAI and Microsoft over unauthorized data scraping. Meanwhile, platforms like Reddit are taking a dual approach—licensing data to Google while taking legal action against other scrapers.
Although Apple declined to comment on the negotiations and has not publicly confirmed which publishers it approached, establishing an industry-wide pay-per-use model could reshape how big tech compensates media companies in the AI era. If these multiyear deals go through, iPhone users may finally get a digital assistant capable of delivering reliable breaking news on demand.
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