Apple’s Siri has been an industry punchline for years, and apparently the company knows it. According to Engadget, Apple is in active negotiations with news publishers to license their content for Siri AI, the redesigned assistant expected to ship with iOS 27 later this year. The goal is to give Siri access to current news and real-time information rather than relying solely on what its underlying models already know.
The structure Apple is proposing is worth paying attention to. Rather than offering guaranteed fees upfront, Apple has proposed a variable compensation model where publishers get paid based on how often their content actually gets used. That’s a meaningful departure from how most large AI labs operate. OpenAI, Google, and others have generally gone the route of flat licensing deals in exchange for broad training access. Apple’s approach is more cautious, and possibly more palatable to publishers who feel burned by the idea of handing over their archives for a one-time check.
Still, this isn’t Apple’s first time licensing publisher content. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the negotiations, noted Apple has struck similar deals in the past that included AI training rights. So the company has existing relationships to build on. What’s new here is the specific focus on powering a live, conversational assistant with up-to-date editorial content, which is closer to what Perplexity does as a core product than what traditional AI assistants have attempted.
The broader context matters here. Siri AI was first shown at WWDC 2024, then essentially vanished for two years before reappearing at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Apple built the assistant in part by distilling Google’s Gemini models, a notable concession for a company that typically builds its core experiences in-house. Early testing showed real improvement over current Siri, but the gap between Apple and where ChatGPT or Gemini Advanced sit today is still wide.
For developers and product teams building on Apple’s ecosystem, this signals that Apple is treating Siri AI as an ongoing project, not a finished one. The content licensing push suggests Apple wants Siri to handle the kind of real-time queries where today’s assistant completely falls apart. Whether variable pay actually convinces major publishers to sign on is another question. But the fact that Apple is actively working these deals, rather than shipping a static model and calling it done, is the more encouraging sign here.
