This edition covers Meta’s attempt to block Sarah Wynn Williams’s memoir Careless People and The Atlantic’s forensic exposé of Meta’s training data, the billion-download milestone for Llama, attitudes to AI among Ibero-American publishers from a trip to Madrid’s Parix IA conference, the Thaler v. Perlmutter appellate ruling reaffirming that copyright requires human authorship, Y Combinator’s report on AI-generated startup code, Baidu’s aggressively priced Ernie models, Anthropic adding web search to Claude, OpenAI’s updated voice models, Zoom’s new AI agents, and details of a forthcoming Publishing Scotland webinar.

This edition covers OpenAI’s “freedom-focused” pitch to the Trump administration on AI policy, an FOI revealing Peter Kyle’s use of ChatGPT for policy advice, Wiley’s gold-standard author AI guidelines, Adam Hyde’s open-source EasyJournal and the wider rise of AI-assisted “vibe coding”, time spent with Ukrainian publishers and the threat of AI training on Russian propaganda, an HBR piece on responsible AI, Sakana’s AI-generated paper passing peer review, OpenAI’s new Responses API for building agents, and AI’s growing role in commissioning decisions across creative industries.

This edition covers Google’s new AI Mode Search and what it means for publisher referral traffic, Mistral OCR as a low-cost tool for digitising older documents, Canva’s State of Marketing and AI benchmarks, Lisa Nandy’s reassurances on creative-industries support at the Creative UK summit, the Authors Alliance submission to the UK AI and copyright consultation, an argument that fears of AI replacing human writing are overstated, and a note ahead of London Book Fair.

This edition covers a busy week at the IPG Conference and a striking Ethan Mollick chart on AI’s collapsing cost and rising performance, Amazon’s Alexa+ upgrade and what agentic shopping means for book discoverability, an HBR piece on AI agents reshaping consumer behaviour, ElevenLabs’ new ElevenReader Publishing offer for synthetic-voice audiobooks, Claude 3.7 Sonnet’s switchable reasoning mode, the arrival of GPT 4.5, and the UK launch of OpenAI’s Sora video generator.

This edition covers The Guardian’s licensing deal with OpenAI alongside the New York Times rolling out internal AI tools, reflections from a BookNet Canada Q&A on how publisher questions are shifting from theory to practice, the limits of OpenAI and Perplexity’s Deep Research products, the ElevenLabs/Spotify audiobook partnership against Audible’s stance on AI narration, Descript’s new Custom GPT, and concerns about the UK Government using an AI tool to analyse its own AI and Copyright consultation responses.

Last September, BookNet Canada invited me to speak at their Tech Forum webinar on the use of AI in publishing. Looking back at my slides, it’s remarkable how much the world has moved on since then, though the eight principles I set out have held up pretty well.

I was invited to deliver a short webinar today for the Swedish Publishers Association and its international affiliates. It was great to see a very strong turnout and thank you to my hosts for arranging it. I talked about recent trends in AI, how publishers are approaching it, and examples of how AI tools are being used.

This edition covers the fractious end to the Paris AI Action Summit and Mistral’s new Le Chat, OpenAI’s plan to unify its product line into GPT-5, Adobe’s commercially-safe Firefly Video Model, a Thomson Reuters fair-use ruling against an AI competitor and the Authors Alliance critique of it, the rise of AI-enabled “personal software”, Matt Webb on agentic AI and Model Context Protocol, and a practical tip for getting ChatGPT and Claude to write in British English.