Mary Rasenberger

Mary Rasenberger is a copyright attorney who has served as chief executive of the Authors Guild — the largest professional organization for published writers in the United States — since 2014. Before joining the Guild she worked on copyright policy at the U.S. Copyright Office and the Library of Congress, and she was a driving force behind the CASE Act, which created a small-claims tribunal for copyright disputes.

Marshalling authors against AI

When generative AI arrived, Rasenberger turned the Guild into the writing profession’s central organizing force. In 2023 she oversaw an open letter to AI companies signed by more than 15,000 authors demanding consent and compensation for the use of their books, and in September of that year the Guild filed its landmark class-action suit against OpenAI — with named plaintiffs including George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, and Sylvia Day.

Rasenberger’s position is pointed but not absolutist. She has repeatedly said the Guild’s objection is to the terms, not the technology: “Our position is that there’s nothing wrong with the tech, but it has to be legal and licensed.” The fight she frames is over building a market in which writers are paid when their work trains a model — not over banning the models themselves.

Under her leadership the Guild also launched practical tools for the AI era, from model contract language on AI rights to a “Human Authored” certification meant to let readers identify books written by people — an effort that drew some debate among authors about how such labels should work.