Apple to Reportedly Take Another Stab at Mixing AI and News. We Haven’t Forgotten Last Time’s Disaster
Siri AI doesn’t suck, which is a minor miracle. But new reporting from the Wall Street Journal suggests Apple is feeling itself so much that it’s in talks with news publishers to form licensing deals that allow it to deliver up-to-the-minute information via its AI-powered voice assistant.
If reading this gives you a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach but you can’t remember why, it’s because Apple tried something similarly ambitious, and the ensuing disaster left a big scar. Apple’s news notification summaries now carry a big, red warning because of what happened in late 2024 and early 2025.
The incident you probably remember was the time Apple’s news notification summaries claimed that the BBC had reported that accused insurance executive assassin Luigi Mangioni had shot himself. He hadn’t.
The issue was that Apple Intelligence had shipped with a notification summaries feature. Apple Intelligence was using AI to condense texts and other communications like Slack messages, but it was also taking the liberty of compressing the personalized news alerts an individual user was seeing on their phone—ostensibly into bite-sized nuggets that could be consumed at a glance. But it was sometimes mangling the truth. Worse: it was claiming that credible news outlets were the ones mangling the truth.
The quality issue that led to these false alerts appears to have been spotted by ProPublica editor Ken Schwencke in November of 2024, a few weeks after the official release of Apple Intelligence. Reviews of notification summaries were not great, but over the next to months, the feature slowly turned into a viral catastrophe.
Apple Intelligence claimed at one point that the BBC had announced that tennis legend Rafael Nadal had come out as gay, and in the process, it made the arguably more consequential mistake of saying he was Brazilian. He is Spanish.
It claimed that the BBC had said darts player Luke Littler had won a final that hadn’t yet been played.
It claimed that the New York Times was saying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested—he hasn’t to this very day, to the consternation of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
In what may have been the last such incident, it claimed that the Washington Post was reporting that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had been fired, which was wrong; and simultaneously that Pam Bondi and Marco Rubio had been confirmed by the Senate as Attorney General and Secretary of State respectively, something that had not yet happened. Then, astonishingly, the next day, it claimed that the Washington Post had reported that the Senate had confirmed Marco Rubio’s Senate Replacement, which isn’t how the Constitution works. The governor of Florida simply picked Rubio’s replacement.
The following day, Apple temporarily shut down the feature. It’s since been re-added, but with the aforementioned red-text warning.
So with all that in mind, it’s fascinating that Apple is reportedly going around to publishers not even two years after all this happened, apparently with the aim of making expensive, long term deals that will feed their news content into Siri.
Citing “people familiar with the matter” the Journal says Apple, which declined the Journal’s request for comment, is looking to make “multiyear” content deals, which would pay different amounts depending on how much a publisher’s content is served to users. The Journal says Apple is working with a “possible nine-figure budget” for this new form of AI-powered news.
Reporting from Gizmodo contributed to this story.
