2026-07-15 · all guides

Amazon KDP AI Disclosure Rules: What You Must Report and What You Do Not

The policy in plain language

Amazon KDP divides AI involvement into two categories with different obligations. AI-generated content is text, images, or translations created by an AI tool, even if you substantially edited the output afterward. This must be disclosed to Amazon during the publishing process. AI-assisted content is material you created yourself where AI helped you edit, refine, error-check, brainstorm, or otherwise improve your own work. This does not need to be disclosed at all.

The pivot is who produced the draft. If the tool wrote the sentences and you shaped them, that is generated. If you wrote the sentences and the tool polished them, that is assisted. Amazon states this ownership test explicitly, and it applies separately to each component of the book: the manuscript text, the cover art, and any interior images each get their own answer.

What the KDP form actually asks

During title setup, KDP asks whether your book contains AI-generated content, and if you answer yes, it asks which elements: text, images, or translations. For each, it asks roughly how much was AI-generated and how much editing you applied, with ranges like none, minimal, some, or extensive rather than exact percentages. It takes under a minute to complete honestly.

Two things the form is not. It is not public: as of 2026, the disclosure is information Amazon collects, and no label, badge, or note appears on your product page. Buyers cannot see it. And it is not a gate: answering yes does not trigger extra review steps, delay publication, or restrict your book. Books with disclosed AI-generated content publish through the same review process, typically within 72 hours, and are held to the same content and quality guidelines as everything else.

Concrete examples on each side of the line

Must disclose: you gave an AI tool a topic and outline and it wrote the chapters, even though you spent ten hours editing the result. You generated your cover image with an image model, even though you added the title text yourself in Canva. You wrote the book in English and used AI to produce the Spanish edition. In all three, the AI produced the underlying content, so the edition containing it discloses.

No disclosure needed: you wrote every chapter and used AI to fix grammar, tighten sentences, or suggest better phrasing. You asked an AI to critique your draft and rewrote weak sections yourself based on its feedback. You used AI to brainstorm fifty title options and picked one. You used AI research summaries as source material but wrote the text yourself. All of that is assistance to your own authorship. The genuinely gray zone is heavy interleaving, where AI drafts paragraphs inside chapters you mostly wrote; the safe reading of the policy is that if any AI-drafted prose survives into the published text, disclose the text as partially AI-generated.

Why honest disclosure is also the strategic answer

The temptation to answer no comes from a fear the disclosure will hurt sales, but since nothing appears on the listing, there is no sales mechanism for it to hurt. The risk runs entirely the other way. Publishing AI-generated content while answering no violates the KDP content guidelines you agreed to, and Amazon enforces guideline violations with book takedowns and, for patterns of violation, account termination, which forfeits the entire catalog and can include held royalties. Trading zero listing impact for account-level risk is a bad trade.

Note what Amazon actually polices in practice: quality and volume, not tooling. It has publishing-volume limits and removes low-quality books regardless of origin. A well-edited, accurate, properly disclosed AI-generated book is squarely within the rules. If you are unsure how your specific workflow classifies, the free tool at /tools/kdp-ai-disclosure walks through the questions KDP asks and tells you which answers your situation requires.

A disclosure workflow you can reuse for every book

Keep a one-line record per book component while you work: text, cover, interior images, translation, each marked generated, assisted, or none, with the tool named. When you reach the KDP form, the answers are already written down, and if Amazon ever asks about your catalog, you have contemporaneous records. This takes thirty seconds per book and removes all ambiguity later, including for books you update: a new edition where you add AI-generated chapters to a previously human-written book changes the answer.

If you publish with a generation tool, the classification is usually simple because the workflow is explicit. Books generated with ebookdone, for example, are AI-generated text by definition, so the disclosure answer is a straightforward yes for text, with your editing level reflecting however much you revised the draft before upload. Answer the form, publish, and spend your energy where the policy actually rewards it: editing quality, accurate metadata, and a book that delivers what its title promises.

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