Amazon asks one AI question when you publish or republish a book through Kindle Direct Publishing: is the text, an image or a translation AI-generated? AI-assisted work does not have to be declared. Since September 2023 KDP has also capped new titles at three per day. Those are the AI rules Amazon has written down. The surge they respond to is now measured: monthly book releases tripled from 2022 to late 2025, and books containing AI text passed half of 2025 releases, according to economists Imke Reimers and Joel Waldfogel.
An earlier version of this page said Amazon had moved to account-level suspensions for undisclosed AI content and cited Amazon data on AI shares of new titles. We could not find an Amazon source for either, so both are gone (see the correction at the end).
What KDP makes you declare
The rule sits in KDP's content guidelines, under "Artificial intelligence (AI) content (text, images, or translations)". Amazon requires you "to inform us of AI-generated content (text, images, or translations) when you publish a new book or make edits to and republish an existing book through KDP." Cover and interior images both count. The line between the two categories is set at creation:
| You did this | KDP category | Declare it? |
|---|---|---|
| An AI tool wrote the chapter, then you rewrote half of it | AI-generated: "even if you applied substantial edits afterwards" | Yes |
| An AI image tool made the cover or interior art | AI-generated image | Yes |
| An AI tool translated the book | AI-generated translation | Yes |
| You wrote the text and used AI to edit, refine or error-check it | AI-assisted | No |
| You brainstormed ideas with AI, then wrote the text yourself | AI-assisted | No |
Screenshot: KDP content guidelines, AI content section, taken October 28, 2026.
Whichever box you tick, KDP adds that you remain "responsible for verifying that all AI-generated and/or AI-assisted content adheres to all content guidelines, including by complying with all applicable intellectual property rights." For which category a given title falls into, our KDP AI disclosure checker asks three questions.
How big the surge is, from three studies
| Source and date | What it measured | Finding |
|---|---|---|
| Reimers and Waldfogel, NBER Working Paper 34777 (January 2026, revised July 2026) | Monthly book releases with an e-book edition, 2022 to late 2025 | Releases "tripled from 2022 to late 2025 as LLMs diffused"; AI-containing books topped half of 2025 releases and are "less used" |
| Joel Waldfogel on NPR's The Indicator (June 25, 2026) | The same data, in numbers | About 300,000 new books released per month by mid to late 2025; most "self-published works published through Amazon" |
| Chakrabarty, Liu, Ginsburg and Dhillon, arXiv 2607.20349 (July 22, 2026) | Full-text AI detection on 14,419 self-published genre-fiction books sold on Amazon, 2023 to June 2026 | Books with observed sales grew 19.2-fold while quarterly revenue grew 8.9-fold; none of the books disclosed whether they contained AI text |
The third study is the one a small publisher should read. Books with more than 25% detected AI text are a large share of the catalog and a smaller share of sales, yet they are "winning a growing share of sales over time and taking more of the scarce top-rank positions." Revenue per selling book fell in most genres. In plain terms: the AI books are not being filtered out, and every honest title now competes in a bigger pile.
What Amazon has done, with dates
- September 2023: KDP began asking whether content is AI-generated when a title is published or republished, the Guardian reported from Amazon's forum post.
- September 18, 2023: KDP lowered new-title creation to three per day "in order to help protect against abuse," saying it had not yet "seen a spike in our publishing numbers," per Publishers Weekly. Publishers hit by the cap could ask for an exception.
- Current guidelines: Amazon says it enforces them with "a combination of machine learning, automation, and dedicated teams of human reviewers," will "reject or remove content that does not adhere," tells the publisher when it removes a title, and allows an appeal.
That is the full public record we found. We could not confirm account suspensions tied to AI non-disclosure, a sweep of older catalog titles, or the policies of other retailers and library distributors that the earlier version listed. If you have an Amazon notice that says otherwise, send it and we will add it.
What people in the trade said
Nicola Solomon, then chief executive of the UK's Society of Authors, welcomed the disclosure question in September 2023 but wanted more: "we would like to see Amazon ask the same question of all books published on KDP," she told the Guardian, and readers should be able to filter AI-generated titles out of search. Three years later, the arXiv study found no disclosure visible on any of its 14,419 books, so that filter still does not exist.
Jeremy Tarr, digital editorial director at Fodor's Travel, described the travel shelf on NPR on June 25, 2026: "you then look at the author, and the author has published, you know, 100 of them, just all over the world, in a very short period of time." Travel is one of the categories where Reimers and Waldfogel saw an especially big increase.
What to file before your next KDP upload
If your team publishes handbooks, lead-magnet e-books or translated editions through KDP, this is the record that answers the AI question honestly and survives a staff change:
- For each title, list which parts an AI tool generated (text, cover, interior images, translation) and which it only edited or brainstormed.
- Tick KDP's AI-generated answer for every generated part, including a translation a human later reviewed.
- Re-answer the question when you edit and republish an older title: the guideline applies to republishing too.
- Keep the tool name, version and date per title next to your AI register.
- Plan launches around the three-new-titles-per-day cap.
- For AI-generated text or art you want to own, read generative AI copyright ownership: the US Copyright Office does not register material without human authorship.
Our take
The disclosure is cheap: one private answer per upload, no label on the product page, and no evidence of a penalty for answering "yes." Answer it accurately and move on. The rumors of account-wide AI purges, including the version this page used to repeat, are not backed by anything Amazon has published, and we would not reorganise a publishing plan around them. The measured problem is the one in the arXiv numbers: books with sales up 19.2 times, revenue up 8.9 times. A small publisher wins that by being findable and specific about one audience, not by trying to keep pace with a monthly release count that tripled in three years.
Correction (October 28, 2026): The June 26 version said Amazon had escalated to account-level restrictions and suspensions for undisclosed AI content, was reviewing previously published titles, and that Amazon data showed over 40% of new KDP titles in Q1 2026 involved AI; it also attributed a "two-thirds" AI share to researchers, listed AI disclosure rules for Smashwords, Draft2Digital, IngramSpark, OverDrive and Hoopla, and included an enforcement table. We found no source for any of these and removed them. The NBER paper reports that AI-containing books topped half of 2025 releases; KDP's guidelines describe rejection or removal of a title, with an appeal.
