Updated Wednesday, April 22, 2026

The Authors Guild is concerned about reports that some publishing professionals are uploading manuscripts and authors’ personal information into consumer-facing AI systems for uses such as generating summaries, assessments, and marketing copy without permission from the authors or adequate guardrails to ensure that the manuscripts are not used by AI companies for training.

Uploading or inputting a copyrighted work or an author’s personal information into AI systems without permission may constitute a violation of the author’s copyright or right of privacy, and it puts the author’s intellectual property and personal information at risk. Editors, agents, and others in the industry who have access to authors’ works should not upload any manuscript to or otherwise prompt consumer-facing chatbots with any author’s works without first getting the author’s written permission. Where consumer-facing chatbots are used in workflows, publishers and other industry professionals should ensure that they opt out of having the work used for training. All of the common chatbots provide this option in their user settings. Publishers should also take care that any internal AI systems are sandboxed models with guardrails to prevent the manuscripts or author information from being used as inputs for training.

Further, to prevent injecting any AI-generated text into an author’s work, publishers should not use AI to edit a manuscript with the exception of basic spelling and grammar- checking applications.

The Authors Guild calls on publishers and others in the industry to enforce strict policies with their staffs to ensure that authors give written permission before their work is uploaded into any AI and to ensure that authors’ works and personal information are not used for training.  

The Authors Guild recommends including the following clauses in publishing agreements to prevent objectionable uses.

No Uploading Author’s Personal Information or Manuscript to Commercial AI

Publisher shall not upload the Work or any of Author’s personal information to consumer-facing AI systems for purposes such as generating summaries, assessments, or marketing copy without written permission from the author or as otherwise agreed to hereunder; and when such permission is granted, it shall ensure that the manuscript is not used by third-party AI companies for training, such as by opting out of allowing training in user settings.

No Substantive Editing with AI

Publisher agrees and warrants that it will not use AI to substantially edit a manuscript (excepting the use of basic spelling and grammar-checking applications).

Read a full set of the Guild’s AI-related clauses at authorsguild.org/ai-model-clauses.