Amazon KDP AI disclosure: what you must declare in 2026

If an AI tool produced text, images, or translations that appear in your final book, Amazon KDP requires you to declare it when you publish or republish, even if you edited that content heavily afterward. If you wrote the book yourself and used AI only for brainstorming, outlining, research, or grammar checking, no disclosure is required. The declaration is internal: buyers never see it on your product page.

The one distinction that decides everything

Amazon’s content guidelines split AI use into two categories. AI-generated covers content “created by an AI-based tool”: if the tool wrote the chapter, drew the cover, or produced the translation, it is AI-generated no matter how much you revised it afterward. AI-assisted covers content you created yourself, where AI helped you refine it: editing suggestions, grammar fixes, idea generation. Only the first category requires disclosure.

The practical test is a single question: who produced the first draft of the words on the page? If the answer is a model, disclose. If the answer is you, and the model only polished, you do not.

Scenario	Disclose?
AI drafted chapters, you rewrote 40 percent by hand	Yes
You wrote everything, AI fixed grammar and suggested edits	No
AI generated the outline, you wrote all the prose yourself	No
AI-generated cover art, human-written text	Yes (images)
Machine-translated edition, human editor reviewed it	Yes (translation)

Where and how you declare it

The question appears inside the KDP publishing workflow, on the content details step, when you create a new title or edit an existing one. You indicate whether the book contains AI-generated text, images, or translations. Three things worth knowing about the mechanics: the answer is not shown to customers, Amazon has stated it does not affect royalties or ranking, and it applies per title, so each book you publish gets its own answer.

What non-disclosure risks

Amazon does not prohibit AI-generated books. It prohibits undeclared ones. Non-disclosure that Amazon detects can result in the title being removed from sale, and repeated or egregious cases can lead to account-level action, which for a self-publisher means the whole catalog. Enforcement has visibly tightened through 2025 and 2026. Set against that, the declaration itself costs nothing: it is invisible to buyers and penalty-free. There is no rational upside to leaving the box unchecked.

Already published without declaring?

Open the title from your KDP bookshelf, edit it, answer the AI content question correctly, and republish. Correcting a declaration proactively puts you in a defensible position; the risk sits entirely on non-disclosure that Amazon finds first.

Document your authorship either way

Separate from the checkbox, keep a simple project log for every book: outline decisions, what you personally wrote and rewrote, sources you verified, dates. It strengthens your copyright position in a catalog full of near-clones, and it is the record you want to have if Amazon ever asks about your workflow. In the ManuScore rubric this is worth checking too: correct disclosure and documented authorship together carry 7 of the 10 compliance points, and they are the cheapest points in the entire audit to earn.

Frequently asked

This article is general guidance, not legal advice. Amazon updates its policies and its publishing interface without notice; always confirm the current wording in the official KDP content guidelines before you publish.