Later this year, when you hold down the button and ask Siri what is happening in the world, the answer may come from a newsroom that Apple actually paid for it. In Malaysia, the newsrooms that do the reporting are still fighting to be paid at all.
Editor
Dinesh Raj chevron_right
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What Apple is actually doing
Apple is in talks to pay news publishers for the right to feed their journalism into its new AI-powered Siri, according to a Bloomberg report covered by TechCrunch. The unusual part is the structure. Instead of a flat annual licence, Apple has floated paying publishers each time their content is used to answer a question, a pay-per-query model that breaks with how these deals normally work. People familiar with the talks put the budget as high as nine figures.
The money is there because the product is expensive. Apple confirmed at its June developer conference that the rebuilt Siri runs on a custom 1.2 trillion parameter model based on Google's Gemini technology, as MacRumors reported, at a compute bill reported to be near a billion US dollars a year. A voice assistant that answers news questions is only as trustworthy as the sources behind it, and licensing real feeds is Apple's way of keeping Siri from confidently making things up and dragging a publisher's name down with it.
Why this matters for Malaysia
Malaysian publishers live and die on the click. When a reader taps through from a search result or a social feed, that visit is the whole business model: the ad impression, the subscription prompt, the returning habit. An assistant that reads the answer aloud and never sends the reader anywhere quietly removes that visit. Apple paying for the content it consumes is, whatever else it is, an admission that the content has value even when nobody clicks.
That is close to the argument Malaysia has been making, slowly. Since 2023 the MCMC has been weighing rules to force Google and Meta to compensate local news outlets, modelled on Australia and Canada, as SoyaCincau reported at the time. Those rules are still not law. The risk now is that the terms of the fight move on before Malaysia finishes the old one. Apple is not talking about paying for links. It is talking about paying for the raw material an AI consumes, and deals like that tend to go to the big US and UK wire publishers first, while everyone else gets scraped for free.
The bigger shift
Apple is not alone in reaching for a chequebook. A global push is underway to make AI companies pay for the journalism they train and run on, from statutory-licensing proposals to renewed attempts to widen Australia's bargaining code, as Poynter has documented. It echoes the same tension we wrote about when Suno began watermarking AI-generated music so the people who own the work can be found and, eventually, paid.
There is a local wrinkle too. The Siri that will pay for news runs on Gemini, and Gemini is already in Malaysian pockets. Google has been folding it into the apps people here use every day, from Ask Maps inside Google Maps to its health tools. The same country now drafting an AI governance bill will soon have to decide whether making the platforms pay includes the assistants quietly answering in Malay and English on millions of phones.
The takeaway
The question for Malaysia is no longer whether an AI will read out the news. It is whether anyone here gets paid when it does. Apple just put a number on the answer. Malaysia has not.
Images courtesy of Omid Armin and Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash.
