Apple offers publishers $100M+, so your iPhone doesn’t lie about the news

Siri AI is Apple's latest attempt to catch up with the AI train, and Apple is prepared to cough up some money in the process.

Siri AI on an iPhone
The upcoming Siri AI could get a big boost when reporting the news. | Image by PhoneArena
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Siri AI is Apple's latest attempt to catch up with the AI train, and Apple is prepared to cough up some money in the process. According to The Wall Street Journal (pay wall), Apple has approached news outlets to strike a deal that would give Siri AI access to the most current information.

Apple proposes a $100+ million deal to publishers


The company offered a special multiyear deal that includes a variable compensation model. What this means is that new outlets will get paid whenever Siri AI uses a piece of their content.

The total budget for this is in the nine-figure range, or hundreds of millions of dollars. The aim is to make Siri AI and your iPhone a reliable news source. Which hasn't always been the case.

Would you pay extra to get better Siri AI news summaries?
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Your iPhone has lied to you before



Back with iOS 18, Apple launched a feature called notification summary. This feature backfired strongly after Apple Intelligence started generating false news and outright lied to people.

Apple had to roll back the feature and work on it for over a year before it was ready for another spin.

Siri AI is coming this fall, baked inside iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27. Apple boasts a big improvement in what this new AI agent can do, and not lying about the new is one big step forward. But the relationship between AI companies and media outlets has been tense.

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AI and the publishers — the big divide



Most media outlets have suffered a substantial hit since AI summaries became a thing. AI bots crawl the content and serve it to users, circumventing the source sites.

As a result, we saw many media outlets disappear in the past couple of years. Publishers are divided when it comes to AI.

The Wall Street Journal, for example, has sued both OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringements, but on the other hand, entities such as News Corp and Axel Springer have signed content deals with AI companies.

Apple doing the right thing?


This pay-per-news-piece approach may be the right thing to do in this situation. After all, media outlets and publishers have to exist to create the content these AI agents crawl, summarize and use.

The big question is, what are the fares, and who decides how much a piece of news costs? At least, your iPhone and Siri AI won't hallucinate or outright lie to you about important things such as the news.



Another good question is whether or not this potential 100M+ deal will impact the prices of Apple devices. Is this the next business model for creating news — consumers paying indirectly to media outlets to have credible info via AI agents? So far the initial reception of Siri AI has been quite positive on Reddit, and many users praise the new and useful things this AI agent can do.

Read more about Siri AI and Apple here:
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