Apple negotiates with publishers for Siri's news feature

What happened

Apple is negotiating content usage fees with news publishers to bring real-time news to Siri AI, the Wall Street Journal reported. Over the past several months, Apple has reportedly reached out to multiple outlets, proposing to incorporate their content into Siri so it can answer questions with up-to-date news and information. According to the report, Apple proposed a variable payment scheme in which it would pay each time content is actually used. This differs from the industry's typical licensing practice of paying a fixed upfront sum in exchange for guaranteed broad access. Apple is said to have considered a nine-figure budget, or more than $100 million, for these payments.

What this means

Siri has long been criticized as a stagnant AI assistant that has failed for years to deliver on promises of getting smarter. Apple is currently working on a major overhaul of Siri, with the new Siri AI expected to launch in the second half of this year. The challenge is that large language models (LLMs) have no knowledge of events after their training cutoff. Answering questions about real-time news or information requires "grounding" — pulling in up-to-date data from outside the model to serve as the basis for responses. This is the same reason OpenAI signed a content licensing deal with News Corp, and Perplexity struck similar deals with multiple publishers. However, those deals typically guaranteed broad content access in exchange for a fixed payment. Apple's proposed usage-based payment model is the opposite. Compensation would vary depending on how often and how extensively a given article is actually cited and used, meaning frequently cited outlets would earn more while less-used outlets would earn less.

Why it matters

If the negotiations are finalized, Siri could be reborn as an AI assistant capable of answering real-time news queries. At the same time, this negotiation approach could set a new benchmark for how AI companies and news publishers value content. If usage-based settlement becomes the norm, publishers would have to accept revenue tied to exposure rather than stable, fixed income. How Apple concludes this experiment could influence how other AI companies price news content going forward.