Apple Wants to Pay News Publishers to Fix Siri’s Fact Problem

Apple is negotiating multi-year, pay-per-use deals with news outlets to give Siri real-time accuracy. Here is why paying journalists beats scraping the web.

Apple wants to fix Siri’s habit of making things up or, in a technical sense, of hallucinating.

The tech powerhouse is pitching multi-year licensing deals to known news publishers. This might be a positive step forward. AI companies have been scraping articles off the web for free- so Apple wants to do things differently. It plans to pay journalists for accurate, real-time facts.

Apple proposed a pay-as-you-go model rather than paying a flat annual fee. The organization will pay the publisher a micro-fee rather than paying a flat annual fee. And there are speculations that it has also set aside a nine-figure budget for these payouts. This comes as a total surprise.

This strategy makes total sense.

Apple learned a tough lesson after its previous AI summarizer generated embarrassing false headlines. The iPhone giant secures trustworthy information while funding newsrooms with fresh cash, i.e., by paying verified outlets directly.

This sets a healthier precedent for a tech industry that routinely takes creator content for granted.

Several media executives are cautious, as a majority of publishers still remember the friction Apple News+ created. Still, if Apple strikes these deals, it transforms Siri into a reliable news engine and forces rivals like OpenAI to open their wallets too.