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An AI Question Disappears From a Copyright Application. The Disclosure Rule Hasn't.

A small-press publisher says an AI question was missing from a U.S. Copyright Office application this week. The Office's 2023 rule requiring authors to disclose AI-generated material is still in force.

The Publishing Times Editorial Desk · October 1, 2026 · 6 min read

An AI Question Disappears From a Copyright Application. The Disclosure Rule Hasn't.

Has the U.S. Copyright Office stopped asking authors about AI? Not as a matter of policy. Lara Helmling, founder of the independent press Forest City Publications, said in a video posted October 1 that an AI question she had seen on earlier copyright applications was missing when her company registered an author's book this week. She said she could find no announcement explaining the change. The Office's published rule on AI-generated material has not changed, and it still requires applicants to disclose that material.

What the video says

Helmling, who runs the YouTube channel The Guerrilla Publisher, was careful about the limits of her claim. "I am not telling you that the copyright office has changed its policy on AI," she said. "To my knowledge it hasn't." Her theory is that the Office may be backing away from a problem it can't easily solve as an examiner: working out which words in an 80,000-word novel came from a person and which came from a machine.

She then went further, saying that in practice "you don't have to tell that copyright office what you used AI for and what you did not," and that authors would instead have to defend their work against the policy if a claim ever reached federal court.

What the Office's rules actually say

That second point goes beyond what the record supports. The Office's registration guidance of March 16, 2023 is still in effect and still posted on copyright.gov. It says AI-generated content that is "more than de minimis should be explicitly excluded from the application." Applicants do that in the Material Excluded field of the Limitation of the Claim section, and describe the human contribution in the Author Created field. Anyone who left out AI material is told to fix the record: contact the Office while the application is pending, or file a supplementary registration after it is issued.

The Office's change log for its online registration system, last updated with an August 13, 2026 entry, lists no release that added or removed an AI question. Its only AI-related entry, dated January 27, 2024, added "material generated by artificial intelligence" to the on-screen instructions for the Limitation of Claim screen. The Publishing Times could not independently confirm what Helmling saw. She also gave two different time frames for how long the question had been there: "six months or so" and "over a year."

Disclosure matters because a registration can be challenged. Under 17 U.S.C. § 411(b), a certificate that includes information the applicant knew was inaccurate can be undermined in an infringement case, if the Register of Copyrights advises that the Office would have refused registration had it known.

The underlying law has also become more settled this year. On March 2, 2026, the Supreme Court declined to hear Thaler v. Perlmutter. That left in place the D.C. Circuit's March 18, 2025 ruling that copyright requires a human author. The Office's January 2025 report on copyrightability sets out where it draws the line. Using AI to assist "does not affect the availability of copyright protection." Purely AI-generated material is not protected. Prompts alone, given current technology, do not give a user enough control to count as the author.

KDP's title cap and AI disclosure

Helmling also covered Amazon's cut to Kindle Direct Publishing's weekly title limit, and her numbers check out. An Internet Archive copy of KDP's Create a Book help page from August 25 shows a limit of "10 per book format each week," along with an invitation to ask for an exception. The live page now says "2 per book format each week" and has no exception line. That is an 80 percent cut, and it took effect September 21, according to the Alliance of Independent Authors. KDP has three formats (Kindle eBook, paperback and hardcover), so an author can still set up two books in every format in a single week.

She was right that Amazon has not linked the cap to AI. KDP says the limit exists "to ensure a positive experience for all authors." Its content guidelines require publishers to tell Amazon about AI-generated text, images and translations, but not about AI-assisted work, such as editing or brainstorming on text the author wrote.

Other platforms draw different lines

  • Draft2Digital. Its content guidelines, last updated October 27, 2025, say it is "not a destination for mass production book farms" and won't accept "content generated solely by machine or other automated processes." It supports AI-assisted content but rejects work "generated entirely by AI/LLMs that has not gone through extensive editing from a human."
  • The Authors Guild. On April 29, 2026, the Guild expanded its model contract clauses. Under the clauses, publishers get no AI training rights unless the contract expressly grants them. Authors approve any AI narration, translation or artwork. Publishers may not use AI to substantively edit a manuscript, apart from basic spelling and grammar tools, or upload it to consumer AI systems without the author's permission.
  • Spotify. On September 9, 2026, Spotify for Authors opened its Audiobook Creation Tools beta to self-published U.S. authors with English-language books. Authors upload an EPUB, choose an ElevenLabs voice and can make up to five audiobooks free. The deal is non-exclusive, and the audiobooks are labeled as digitally narrated.

Helmling's view is that no single institution has settled the question, so authors should "choose, hold, adapt." That means picking a position on AI, sticking with it, and changing course only when new information affects their own books.

What authors can do now

  1. Disclose even if the form doesn't ask. If a book contains more than a trivial amount of AI-generated text or art, list it under Material Excluded and describe your own authorship.
  2. Keep your drafts. Version history and notes are the simplest proof of what you wrote if a registration is ever questioned.
  3. Check each platform's current rules. Amazon, Draft2Digital and Spotify set different terms, and all three have changed them within the past year.

Sources