For authors, publishers and technology companies, it’s been a week that challenges the old axiom that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. The practical uses highlighted in the rest of this week’s newsletter need to be balanced against good strategy and judgement.*  The news this week has been dominated by Hachette’s withdrawal of a hyped book after a New York Times piece questioned whether AI had been used in the writing process. This is a minefield for authors and publishers, and the more I read about it, the less comfortable I am.

This piece was commissioned by James McConnachie and first published in the Spring 2026 issue of The Author, the journal of the Society of Authors. It is reprinted with their permission.

It’s been a busy week, with significant developments in copyright policy and a steady drumbeat of new research and product launches. The key question posed by new research linked to below has stayed with me: for the right task, AI brings real benefits, but how do we determine what the right task is?*  I gave the morning keynote at the ALPSP University Press Redux conference in Liverpool on Wednesday, talking about the impact of AI on scholarly publishing. It was one of the best conferences I’ve attended in a long time, with particularly good follow-up discussions in the breaks afterwards. My slides are available here.

I gave the opening keynote at the ALPSP University Press Redux conference in Liverpool earlier today, discussing how generative AI is affecting scholarly publishing. My professional background is in trade rather than scholarly publishing, so instead of focusing on the university press business model or specific AI tools, I tried to step back and look at a macro question: what happens when AI changes both how knowledge is produced and how it is discovered.

I’m catching up after three intense days at London Book Fair. That intensity has been mirrored in the AI world, with a slew of copyright and licensing developments, some new practical tools for publishers, and catastrophically misjudged AI developments at Grammarly, Amazon and McKinsey.*  I wrote up my reflections from LBF here, including some thoughts on AI at the Fair: more businesslike, but unevenly distributed. What struck me most was the gap between the publishers talking about it abstractly and the people using it fluently.

I’ve just had three very busy days with friends, colleagues and clients at the London Book Fair. I spent time with every company in my portfolio, and had a great discussion with my publisher about my forthcoming book (watch this space for more). While the show is still fresh in the mind, here are a few reflections—less a comprehensive account of the Fair than a set of personal observations, raw signals and conversations that struck me over the last few days.

A new Anthropic research paper on AI and employment is getting a lot of attention. At face value, it suggests that the sectors most vulnerable to disruption from AI are white-collar, analytical professions: law, finance, management, media and arts, many academic disciplines. The headline finding and a radar chart of affected areas have been repeated ad nauseam in my LinkedIn feed. But a careful reading of what is a genuinely interesting paper explains why I find it less alarming than first appearance might suggest, despite it affecting the fields closest to my own work.

It has been a week in which AI moved decisively out of product demos and into politics, newsrooms, courts, and war. Across very different domains, the same underlying tensions keep surfacing: control, accountability, and whether speed is crowding out judgement.*  The outbreak of war in the Middle East is uncomfortable territory but impossible to ignore. The relevance to this newsletter is that arguments about the role of AI in those military operations led to a very public break-up between Anthropic and the Pentagon, OpenAI stepping into the gap, a consumer backlash with 1.5 million users leaving ChatGPT (importantly, it isn’t clear what proportion of that number is paying users) and Claude hitting number one on Apple’s App Store chart.