Anti-AIOrganization

The Authors Guild

Writers’ Advocacy Organization

America’s oldest and largest professional writers’ organization, leading the landmark class-action copyright suit against OpenAI on behalf of George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, and thousands of authors whose books trained AI without consent.

Organization Author

Wikipedia authorsguild.org

In their words

It is imperative that we stop this theft in its tracks or we will destroy our incredible literary culture, which feeds many other creative industries in the U.S.

— Mary Rasenberger, CEO — Authors Guild press release, 2023

Biography

Founded in 1912, the Authors Guild is the oldest and largest professional organization for writers in the United States, with roughly 15,000 members. For a century its battles were royalties, contracts, and censorship; since 2023 its defining fight has been generative AI, which CEO Mary Rasenberger describes as theft of authors’ work at industrial scale.

Authors Guild v. OpenAI

On September 20, 2023, the Guild and seventeen prominent authors — including George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, Jonathan Franzen, and George Saunders — filed a class-action suit against OpenAI (later adding Microsoft) in the Southern District of New York, alleging the company copied their books wholesale to train ChatGPT. The complaint pointed to GPT-generated fake sequels, including an attempted volume six of Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, as evidence of both the copying and its market harm. The case, consolidated with related suits, became one of the bellwether tests of whether training on copyrighted books is fair use.

Beyond the courtroom, the Guild organized a 2023 open letter to AI companies signed by more than 15,000 writers demanding consent, credit, and compensation; pushed publishers to add AI clauses to contracts; launched a “Human Authored” certification mark; and supported authors in the case against Anthropic that produced a $1.5 billion settlement in 2025 — the largest copyright recovery in history. The Guild is not abolitionist about AI: its position is that licensing markets, not scraping, should feed the machines.