Apple in talks to pay publishers per use

Apple is discussing multiyear content deals with news publishers to feed its upgraded Siri AI current information, and it wants to pay per use rather than the flat annual licensing fees that have become standard across the AI industry, according to The Wall Street Journal. The proposed budget runs to nine figures.

The pay-per-use structure is the notable part. OpenAI, Google, and other AI companies have mostly signed publishers to fixed-fee deals that grant broad access to their archives regardless of how often the content actually gets used. Apple’s variable model ties payment to actual citations, which could mean less money for publishers whose content rarely comes up in a Siri answer, and more scrutiny of how often that happens.

The stakes are higher for Apple than for most AI companies launching a news feature. Its iOS 18 notification-summary tool generated false headlines that misled users badly enough that Apple pulled news summaries entirely for over a year while it rebuilt the underlying system. The upgraded Siri, built with more of Apple’s own AI work than earlier versions, is scheduled to arrive this autumn as part of Apple’s next major OS releases.

What it means for you

If your organization publishes content that could plausibly answer a Siri query, a pay-per-use deal is worth less certainty than a flat license, and worth pushing for reporting on citation volume before you sign anything. It also confirms Apple learned the expensive way that unreliable AI summaries carry real reputational cost, so expect Siri’s news answers to lean conservative at launch. Google’s decision to let users strip the visible watermark from its AI generations is a reminder that every major AI platform is now negotiating its own version of the same tradeoff: give users and partners more flexibility, while keeping enough attribution infrastructure in place to answer for what the AI produced.