Most AI content deals buy wide access for a flat fee. Apple's would pay only where a publisher's material is drawn on — hundreds of millions of dollars are on the table, with none of it guaranteed to any one publisher.

Apple is in discussions with publishers about new deals that would give its Siri AI voice assistant access to current news and information, The Wall Street Journal reports. The money would move with use: instead of a flat licensing fee in return for wide-ranging access to a publisher's content — the shape most AI content deals take — publishers would collect only where their material is actually drawn on. For those payments, Apple has considered a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The content would supply Siri AI, which is due to arrive in the fall alongside iOS 27, iPadOS 27 and macOS 27. The talks are running while Apple pursues a substantial upgrade of Siri, an effort that comes years after the company pledged users a sharper, more capable AI assistant.

The proposals under discussion would be multiyear, according to The Wall Street Journal, and none of it is settled. Apple did not immediately reply when TechCrunch asked for comment.

Apple has put AI-generated news headlines in front of users before, with poor results: a notification-summary feature in iOS 18 became an embarrassment after its Apple Intelligence system produced false news headlines that misled users, and the company took the AI-generated news summaries offline and kept them off for over a year while it worked on fixes. Siri AI marks a sharp break from Siri's earlier incarnation, and with it the company again has reason to make certain the news headlines it serves up are correct.

Apple has bought publisher content before, on other terms. It has signed content-licensing deals that carried rights to use publishers' material for AI training, and it has worked with publishers as partners on the Apple News+ subscription service since 2019 — an arrangement a number of them pulled out of, dissatisfied with the content agreements.

Cover image: “Apple Campus One Infinite Loop Sign” by Joe Ravi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, resized, re-encoded.