The Rupert Murdoch-owned media conglomerate News Corp announced on Thursday a partnership with Symbolic.ai to deploy the company’s AI publishing platform at Dow Jones Newswires, the financial news service that sits alongside The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and MarketWatch under the Dow Jones umbrella.

Symbolic.ai was founded by former eBay CEO Devin Wenig and Ars Technica co-founder Jon Stokes. The startup bills itself as the first AI-native platform built specifically for professional communicators across news, corporate communications, and public relations.

The company claims its platform delivered “productivity gains of as much as 90% for complex research tasks” during early testing at Dow Jones Newswires, according to the company’s press release.

The platform handles the routine grunt work that chews up reporter time: audio transcription, document extraction, newsletter creation, and fact-checking. It also includes headline optimization and SEO guidance features designed specifically for publishing workflows.

“A future where technology streamlines research and production, freeing people to focus on the creative, analytical, and investigative work that truly sets their content apart,” Wenig said in the announcement.

News Corp CEO Robert Thomson praised the startup’s editorial DNA. “The Symbolic team’s deep editorial roots are obvious in their sincere appreciation of provenance, and their patent desire to create products that enhance, not deface, demean or devalue journalism,” Thomson said.

The partnership signals News Corp’s continued push into AI integration. In 2024, the company signed a multi-year licensing deal with OpenAI and has reportedly been in talks with Google about similar arrangements, according to TechCrunch.

Symbolic is targeting what it calls a $100 billion global market for fact-based communication and publishing. The company pitches its platform as solving the fragmented landscape of disconnected AI tools that many newsrooms currently navigate.

For media organizations watching from the sidelines, the News Corp deal offers a test case. If a publisher this large can integrate AI tools without compromising editorial standards, it could accelerate adoption across the industry.

The post News Corp taps AI startup Symbolic.ai to supercharge Dow Jones Newswires appeared first on The Media Copilot.

Apple has chosen Google’s Gemini AI to power the next generation of Siri after months of weighing options from OpenAI and Anthropic. The multiyear deal, announced Monday, positions both companies to fend off competition from fast-growing AI startups.

The partnership lets Apple use Gemini and Google’s cloud technology to build what the company calls more personalized and agentic versions of its assistant. Apple Intelligence features will still run on Apple devices and its Private Cloud Compute servers, both companies emphasized.

Apple reportedly will pay Google around $1 billion per year for the arrangement, according to Bloomberg. That’s a fraction of the up to $20 billion Google paid Apple annually to remain the default search engine on iPhones.

The relatively modest price tag signals how much both sides gain. Apple gets AI technology it failed to build in-house after a year of embarrassing stumbles. Google gets distribution to hundreds of millions of iPhone users and cements its position as a go-to AI provider.

“From Apple’s perspective, it’s certainly a win if you think about the pain that they’ve had in their AI strategy up to this point,” William Kerwin, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, told The Verge. “They over-promised back in the summer of 2024, and they under-delivered.”

Apple’s AI troubles mounted throughout 2025. Its Apple Intelligence message summaries produced errors. Promised Siri features never arrived despite TV ads promoting them. The company replaced longtime AI chief John Giannandrea with Vision Pro leader Mike Rockwell.

The deal could invite the same antitrust scrutiny Google just survived over its search payments to Apple. A federal judge ruled last fall that Google could continue those payments, clearing the path for this AI arrangement.

But legal experts say regulators may still come knocking.

“It could be that the market could evolve in a way that would make a deal like this more problematic over time,” James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Tech, told The Verge.

The partnership represents a defensive alliance between two companies threatened by AI upstarts like OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither wants to cede ground to startups that could disrupt their longtime dominance.

“Apple is concerned that the rise of AI threatens to go completely around it,” Grimmelmann said. “This is its attempt to remain in that relationship and remain relevant.”

The upgraded Siri is expected to launch sometime in 2026.

The post Siri-Gemini partnership lets Apple, Google fend off upstart rivals appeared first on The Media Copilot.