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.
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