Penguin Random House

Penguin Random House, formed in the 2013 merger of Penguin and Random House and owned by Bertelsmann, is the largest trade publisher in the world, releasing tens of thousands of titles a year across some 300 imprints. In October 2024 it became the first of the Big Five publishers to write generative AI directly into its books.

A copyright page rewritten for the AI era

The amended boilerplate — “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems” — now appears in all new titles and reprinted backlist worldwide. A second clause expressly reserves the works from the European Union’s text-and-data-mining exception, closing the loophole that lets AI developers mine lawfully accessed content unless rights are reserved. The change landed amid mounting evidence that pirated book troves had been used to train major AI models, and alongside lawsuits from the The Authors Guild and individual novelists.

Critics noted the limits of the gesture. Author and activist Cory Doctorow argued the reservation does more for the publisher than for writers — copyright pages do not bind model trainers who never agreed to them, and PRH reserved the right to strike its own AI licensing deals. Indeed, the company has said it will approach AI opportunities case by case, and its statement stopped short of ruling out selling training access on negotiated terms.

Still, the move made PRH the standard-bearer for a consent-first position in publishing: training on its books is forbidden by default, and anyone who wants them must come to the table. Rival publishers, including HarperCollins, chose the opposite experiment — selling licensed access — making the two houses the poles of the industry’s AI debate.