Apple is in talks to pay publishers for the right to feed their news content into the upcoming Siri AI, and has floated a nine-figure budget to cover the payments, according to The Wall Street Journal. The outreach has intensified in recent months as Apple races to ship a redesigned Siri that can answer questions about current events — a capability the current assistant conspicuously lacks. Siri AI is slated to launch later this year.
The structure Apple is proposing breaks with how the rest of the industry has been licensing news for AI. Instead of the guaranteed flat fees that OpenAI, Google, and others have used to secure broad access to publisher archives, Apple wants a variable, pay-per-use model that compensates publishers only when Siri actually surfaces their content. It is closer to a metered API contract than a traditional media deal.
That structure has trade-offs for both sides. For Apple, it caps downside if Siri usage of news content is lower than expected and avoids the awkwardness of paying a large fixed sum to a publisher whose content the assistant rarely cites. For publishers, it introduces revenue uncertainty and hands Apple control over the meter — the same dynamic that has made programmatic ad revenue notoriously unpredictable for the news business.
Key facts
- 01Apple is in talks with publishers to license news content for the upcoming Siri AI, per The Wall Street Journal.
- 02The company has considered a nine-figure budget to fund the payments.
- 03Apple proposed a variable, pay-per-use model rather than the industry-standard fixed licensing fee.
- 04Siri AI is expected to roll out later this year, after multiple delays to Apple's promised assistant overhaul.
The nine-figure budget signals that Apple expects material volume. A number in the low hundreds of millions across the publisher ecosystem would place Apple's spend in the same rough range as the licensing deals OpenAI has struck with major news organizations over the past two years, though the pay-per-use structure means individual publisher outcomes could vary widely.
Apple declined to comment on the report. Which publishers are at the table has not been disclosed.
The talks come as Apple tries to close a gap it has been openly behind on. The company announced a redesigned Siri as part of Apple Intelligence more than a year ago and has since pushed back the launch of the more capable version multiple times. Rivals shipped in the meantime: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot all answer current-events questions today, most of them by combining licensed content, web search, and retrieval from live sources.
Live news access is one of the harder pieces of that stack. Model weights are frozen at training time, so any assistant that answers a question about this morning's headlines is either doing retrieval against a live index or reading from a licensed feed. Apple, which has historically been reluctant to build a general-purpose search index, appears to be leaning on licensing to solve the problem directly at the source.
The variable-payment model is where the deal gets interesting for the broader market. If Apple can push publishers to accept pay-per-use terms, every other AI company negotiating a renewal will point to Apple's structure as the new benchmark. Publishers have spent the past two years arguing that flat fees undervalue their archives; a metered model concedes the point in principle but shifts the risk of low usage entirely onto them.
There is also the question of what happens to publishers who don't sign. Apple's assistant either answers news questions using licensed content, declines to answer, or falls back to web results and third-party providers. The company has an existing relationship with ChatGPT for general queries in iOS 18, and it is not clear whether Siri AI will handle news questions internally or route them out.
For Apple, the strategic bet is that a Siri that reliably answers questions about the news — sourced, attributed, and legally clean — is worth paying for even at a nine-figure run rate. The alternative is another Siri launch that ships without the one feature users have been asking for since ChatGPT changed expectations three years ago.
The pay-per-use structure is the story here more than the dollar figure. If it holds, it reframes AI-news licensing as a metered utility rather than a bulk archive sale, and pushes the negotiation leverage back toward whichever platform controls the meter. Apple has the install base to make that stick. Publishers, having watched a decade of platform economics play out the same way, have every reason to push back — and not much leverage to do so if Siri AI ships with or without them.
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