WIRED: HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette quietly use Claude and ChatGPT for publicity copy, cover art and agent emails; staff push back
Confirmed
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 10 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra162 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5101 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 3.8 Flash192 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7131 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 101 days before it.
Key facts
- Sources: interviews with more than two dozen workers, all anonymous
- HarperCollins bought Claude licenses from Anthropic ‘months ago’, plus ChatGPT and Jasper; dozens of staff were ‘voluntold’ to be ‘AI Champions’ in monthly brainstorming sessions; one division is ‘all in’, including AI-made marketing videos
- Most common use across the three houses: generating publicity copy (used on Amazon, Goodreads, back covers and pitches); agents suspect editors use AI for rejection letters
- Simon & Schuster: staff attended an OpenAI workshop that recommended ChatGPT for emailing literary agents; held a May 2024 AI use-case contest ($10,000 top prize); AI assets appear in some cover art
- Skan AI: a trial reportedly ‘at the apparent urging of KKR’ (S&S’s owner) prompted an employee open letter to CEO Greg Greeley; his Oct 6 memo said ‘no decision has been made’ on Skan’s Blueprint or similar tools. Pangram flagged parts of the memo as AI-written (per WIRED)
- Publisher statements: Hachette supports AI ‘for operational purposes’ but not ‘creative uses of AI, including communicating with our authors and partners’; S&S (Wibke Grutjen) says access to vetted enterprise tools is not mandatory
- Agents are adding contract clauses barring manuscripts from being run through LLMs; HarperCollins legal told editors not to paste full manuscripts into online LLMs
What happened
In public, US publishers have sued AI companies and cancelled books suspected of AI use. Inside, WIRED’s sources describe executives pushing LLM use on staff who were cut back by layoffs. Editors told WIRED that the publicized cases of AI-written books, such as Hachette’s Shy Girl, are “just the tip of the iceberg” of quiet cancellations. Agents and staff mainly ask for clear AI-use guidelines and disclosure.
Why it matters
It shows the gap between the industry’s public stance on generative AI and its internal adoption. That gap matters for authors’ consent and contracts, and for whether readers can trust that book marketing and covers were made by people.
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 1 press, 1 reaction
Press
Reactions
- Techmeme discussion of the WIRED storytechmeme.com, discussion
Changes
- Filed (Techmeme)