“It was a dark and stormy night.
In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind…”
The words at the beginning of this article are, of course, from A Wrinkle in Time by Medeleine L’Engle. (They’re also wrapped in quotation marks, an indication that they aren’t original to this article.)
And yet, the atmospheric and imagination-stimulating power of words can be easily stolen by others. In the age of AI? That’s more front of mind than ever. (And unlike this article, AI wouldn’t use quotation marks to establish differently.)
Theft of intellectual property has been a problem probably as long as humans have been creating it, but the ante’s been upped of late due to the rise in a peculiar dynamic. Companies at the forefront of the AI revolution—or, depending on who you are and how you feel, the AI-powered degeneration of creativity and original thought—have been caught feeding unauthorized books and work to AI models. They’re even using the names and works of authors without their consent.
In September 2025, Anthropic settled a class-action lawsuit in which the company was using pirated books to train its AI agent Claude; the payment of $1.5 billion amounts to approximately $3,000 for each of the approximately 500,000 books included. In March 2026, journalist Julia Angwin filed a lawsuit against Grammarly (which rebranded its parent company as Superhuman) for mimicking herself and plenty of other creatives as part of its AI tool “Expert Review.”
In both cases, the companies in question were accused of abusing the rights of authors. The first lawsuit was resolved in favor of those whose works were stolen, and the second lawsuit is still pending.
The problem with what Superhuman (who did not answer Fast Company’s request for comment for this article) and Anthropic did is that they “used these books without permission,” says Trip Adler, founder of Created by Humans, a company that intends to put authors’ rights back into their own hands.
Bridging the gap
Adler, who also founded the digital library Scribd, admitted he learned the importance of appropriately crediting authors and creatives the hard way.
He had just graduated college when Scribd debuted in March 2007, and “we had all these people uploading pirated books, and that was how I got exposed to the book industry and how copyright works. I feel like you have to go down that path to really understand what copyright is about.”
With Created by Humans, Adler hopes to do things differently—aiming to bridge the gap between creatives and AI so that their work is better safeguarded.
For starters, he wants to “allow these companies to use the books, but with the permission of the rights holders.”
At the moment, “there’s not one simple way to clear the rights.” Part of the problem, he added, is that “these AI rights have never been defined. They’re typically shared across multiple rights holders.”
Those rights holders include authors, publishers, and literary agents, he continued. “We work with the authors and publishers who are enthusiastic about AI. We cleared the AI rights and then we get a licensing model going with AI companies.”
A long and complicated legal battle
The U.S. Copyright Office released part one of its Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence in July 2024 to address digital replicas; part two, pertaining to copyrightability, was published in January 2025. The third part, which more specifically addresses generative AI-training, was initially released in May 2025, but has not yet been published in its final form.
Part two, section B of that third document, titled “Generative Learning Models,” closely pertains to previous and ongoing lawsuits between AI companies and creatives in the United States. The report notes that AI models “are well-known for requiring … millions or billions of works for training purposes” and that “text scraped from the internet often contains error messages or other content with limited or negative training value.”
While there aren’t a lot of companies out there doing what Adler is attempting (at least not yet), publishing houses launched their own joint initiative in February. The five largest (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan) announced a plan to protect the rights of authors from AI.
“This is a watershed moment for the publishing industry,” said Markus Dohle, CEO of Penguin Random House, in a statement. “For the first time, we’re speaking with one voice on an issue that affects every writer we work with.”
Per literary news outlet The Authors Manuscriptia, those protections include “mandatory disclosure when AI is used in any part of the book creation process, explicit consent requirements before any author’s work can be used for AI training, and a standardized compensation structure for authors whose works are included in AI training datasets.”
Alder also noted it’s his belief “other people in Silicon Valley just don’t really understand” creative rights acquisition.
“I think that’s kind of our role here,” he says, “to help people figure it out and just make it easier. People want to make it so that AI companies find this easy because they don’t want to go negotiate one million contracts with authors. They just can’t do that.”
To that end, it seems that time is of the essence. Without firm, established rules dictating what AI can and cannot lift, more authors may find their work has been stolen — and that AI is to blame.
