Apple Is Negotiating Nine-Figure News Deals to Feed Its Gemini-Powered Siri

Verified key facts

• Apple is negotiating multi-year deals with news publishers to give its rebuilt Siri access to current news and other information, according to reporting relayed by TechCrunch and Engadget on 13 August
• The proposed structure pays partner publishers when their content is actually used by Siri, rather than through a fixed licence fee, per Quartz
• The budget discussed for those payments runs into nine figures, according to the same reporting
• Apple and Google announced a multi-year partnership on 12 January 2026 under which Gemini models power a rebuilt Siri and the next generation of Apple Intelligence, CNBC reported
• CNBC reported Apple was expected to pay Google around one billion dollars a year for the arrangement
• The rebuilt Siri is expected to ship with iOS 27 later this year

A licensing negotiation with an unusual shape

Apple is in talks with news publishers over multi-year agreements that would let a rebuilt Siri draw on current news and other timely information, according to reporting relayed by TechCrunch, Engadget and Quartz in the middle of August.

The detail that makes the talks notable is the payment model. Rather than a flat annual licence fee of the kind that has characterised most AI content deals since 2023, Apple has proposed compensating publishers variably, according to how often their material is actually used in Siri's answers.

The overall budget under discussion has been described as running into nine figures. Spread across a set of publishers and several years, that is a meaningful sum without being transformative for any large news organisation on its own.

Why usage-based payment matters to publishers

Fixed licence fees have been the industry norm because they are simple to negotiate and easy to audit: a publisher grants access to an archive, receives an agreed sum, and neither side needs to agree on how the material performs afterwards.

Usage-based payment inverts that. It ties a publisher's revenue to how often an assistant reaches for its reporting, which rewards outlets that produce distinctive and frequently cited work and pays less to those whose coverage duplicates what is available elsewhere.

It also creates a measurement problem that has no settled answer. Publishers would be relying on Apple's own telemetry to determine what they are owed, and the terms on which that data is shared and verified will matter more to the economics of any deal than the headline budget figure.

The Gemini deal underneath it

The Siri that these deals would supply is not the one currently shipping. On 12 January 2026, Apple and Google jointly announced a multi-year partnership under which Google's Gemini models became the foundation for a rebuilt Siri and the next generation of Apple Intelligence features, as CNBC reported.

CNBC put the value of that arrangement at roughly one billion dollars a year. It marked a decisive shift for a company that had spent two years insisting its assistant strategy would be built primarily on its own models and on-device processing.

News licensing sits on top of that foundation rather than replacing it. A large language model can produce fluent answers about the world as it was when the model was trained; it cannot report what happened this morning without a live source, which is what the publisher deals are intended to supply.

What Apple gets that a search index does not give it

Apple already has arrangements that surface news inside its products, including Apple News. The difference with an assistant is attribution and liability: when Siri answers a question about a developing story in its own voice, the accuracy of that answer becomes Apple's problem in a way that a list of headlines never was.

Licensed feeds from named publishers give the company a defensible provenance chain for those answers, and a commercial relationship with the organisations most likely to object if their work is used without permission.

That second consideration has been shaped by two years of litigation between publishers and AI companies. Buying access ahead of launch is considerably cheaper than defending the alternative, and Apple has generally preferred to pay for content rights rather than argue about them.

The publishers' calculation

For news organisations the offer is genuinely double-edged. An assistant that answers a reader's question using a publisher's reporting, without sending that reader to the publisher's site, removes the advertising and subscription value that the reporting was funded to generate.

Set against that, refusing to license does not reliably keep the material out of AI answers, and it forfeits the payment. Most large publishers have concluded over the past two years that a negotiated price is preferable to an unpaid one, while pressing for terms that require prominent attribution and links.

Whether Apple's proposed terms include those attribution requirements has not been reported. It is the single most consequential open question in the talks, and it will determine whether the arrangement supplements publishers' traffic or substitutes for it.

How this compares with the rest of the market

OpenAI, Amazon, Meta and Google have all signed content agreements with news organisations over the past two years, most of them structured as fixed multi-year fees. Some have been disclosed, most have not, and the reported values have ranged from single-digit millions to well over a hundred million dollars in aggregate.

Apple entering the same market with a usage-based structure is a competitive move as well as an editorial one. If it works, it gives Apple a defensible cost base that scales with the value it actually derives, rather than a fixed obligation it must pay regardless.

For publishers weighing several offers at once, the comparison is no longer simply which company is paying more, but which payment model is likely to be worth more over the life of the contract.

The iOS 27 release that sets the deadline

The rebuilt Siri is expected to ship with iOS 27 later this year, which fixes the timetable for these negotiations. Content deals that are not signed before the assistant reaches the public are deals struck from a weaker position, because by then the product exists and works without them.

That is the pressure both sides are operating under. Apple needs current news in the assistant at launch for it to be credible on the questions users most often ask; publishers know that a launch without them establishes a precedent about what the assistant is worth.

Neither Apple nor any publisher has confirmed a signed agreement, and Apple has not commented publicly on the reporting. The first firm evidence of how these talks resolved will be the list of named sources Siri cites when iOS 27 ships.

Sources

• TechCrunch - Apple in talks to pay publishers to provide Siri with current news: report
• Engadget - Apple is reportedly turning to publishers for help with Siri AI
• Quartz - Apple is in talks to pay publishers for news content to power its new AI Siri
• CNBC - Apple picks Google's Gemini to run AI-powered Siri coming this year
• TechCrunch - Google's Gemini to power Apple's AI features like Siri
• Slashdot - Apple turns to publishers for help with Siri AI