A Human or an AI Agent Can Copy Your Book. It’s Already Happening.

The robbery no one sees

Somewhere right now, a book is being copied, reworded, repackaged and sold under someone else’s name.

The author will never know. The royalty will never arrive. The reader will never find the original.

This is the invisible robbery of our time, and it does not stop at books. A video is downloaded, trimmed and reposted on a dozen channels before the creator wakes up. An investigative story is rewritten by a machine and published on a site that never paid a reporter. A film trailer is cloned with a synthetic face.

The scale is no longer hypothetical. In September 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay authors $1.5 billion, roughly $3,000 per book, over pirated copies of about 500,000 books it downloaded to train its models. Lawyers for both sides called it the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history. That is half a million books, and years of someone’s life behind each one.

And that is only the case that reached a courtroom.

As AI accelerates, the cost of copying falls to zero. The value of being the original should rise. Right now, it doesn’t. The copy travels faster, ranks faster and earns faster than the person who made the thing in the first place.

So I want to ask every author reading this one question. When the copies outnumber the original, how will anyone know which one is yours?

Kill switch, or a better lock?

There are two sides to this argument, and I hear both in every room I speak in.

The first side says hit the kill switch. Slow it down. Go back to normal. Put the genie back in the bottle.

I understand the feeling. But I have been in technology and marketing for nearly 30 years, and I have never seen a technology un-invented. The printing press did not go back. The internet did not go back. AI will not go back.

The second side asks a better question. Can there be a technology that protects our creations, our ideas, our thoughts? Something that proves who made what, as humans, and dare I say it, even as AI agents acting on our behalf?

Think about how cryptocurrency works. When a coin is mined, the blockchain records where it came from, the block, the miner and the moment. Anyone can trace it back. No one has to take your word for it.

Now imagine that same transparency for a book. A painting. A song. A news photograph. A record of origin that travels with the work, wherever it goes.

My answer to the second question is yes. That technology exists today.

The quantum clock is moving

Before I explain it, you need to understand why the old locks won’t hold.

The security world has a name for the day a quantum computer becomes powerful enough to break the encryption and digital signatures we rely on today. It calls it Q-Day. Passwords, bank logins and the signatures that prove a document is real all depend on that math.

For years, Q-Day was treated as a problem for our grandchildren. That forecast is being pulled closer, fast.

• In 2019, Craig Gidney and Martin Ekerå estimated that breaking a 2048-bit RSA key would take about 20 million noisy qubits.
• In May 2025, Gidney, of Google Quantum AI, revised that to fewer than one million noisy qubits running for less than a week, roughly 20 times fewer.
• Experts surveyed for the Global Risk Institute’s 2025 Quantum Threat Timeline Report put the odds of a code-breaking quantum computer within 10 years at 28 to 49 percent.
• NIST has proposed deprecating today’s vulnerable algorithms after 2030 and disallowing them after 2035.

No one can name the exact year. But the standards bodies have stopped waiting, and so should creators.

Here is why this matters to an author. If the record that proves you wrote your book is signed with today’s common algorithms, a quantum computer could one day forge it. Someone could fake a claim of authorship, or cast doubt on yours. The proof of your life’s work would be only as strong as the weakest lock protecting it.

And that vulnerability grows every year we keep using locks we already know will fail.

Two futures, one question

The people building this future are telling us, openly, how big the change will be.

Bill Gates said in February 2025 that within the next decade, AI will mean humans won’t be needed “for most things.” Great medical advice and great tutoring, he predicted, will become free and commonplace. That is a gift for some and a shock for others. Jobs will change. Some will go. For many families, the transition will hurt.

Add recursive, self-improving agents and a harder question appears. Will we need to work at all? Will we simply be surrounded by agents, unable to tell who is speaking, who wrote what, who owns what? Could we be robbed of our own creations, whether that is a book, a piece of art or a bank account?

That is the dark side. And honestly, the idea that technology is coming to destroy humans is a little silly. Humans build technology. Humans decide how it is used.

The upside is real too. Better health. Better living. Elon Musk talks about an age of abundance, in which AI and robots make work optional within 10 to 20 years and a “universal high income” replaces scarcity.

Whether you believe the dark forecast or the bright one, both lead to the same question. In a world of infinite copies and infinite agents, what do we hold as ours?

I believe the answer is our origin, the proof that we made something, sealed so it can’t be secretly altered. It may not be copy proof. But a judge, a jury, a reader, even an AI agent can trace the work back to its author. That is our signature.

My vision, my story, my legacy

Let me make this personal.

I wrote The AI Translator: Making Your Marketing Message Click With People And Code. Michael Ashley, a dear friend and someone I hold in the utmost respect, was the wordsmith. He took my life stories and my thinking on AI marketing and search optimization and turned them into the most beautiful analogies and stories, bringing my thought leadership to life on the page. This was a couture book, made by hand, stitch by stitch.

But the vision is mine. The life inside those pages is mine. I wrote it with one passion, connecting Team Human and Team AI. I wanted people who felt left behind by AI to feel invited in. Every chapter carries my years of work, my mistakes, my clients’ stories and my voice.

I don’t want it copied. I don’t want it turned into a machine-spun knockoff with my ideas and someone else’s name. And I certainly don’t want to lose the revenue it earns, because that revenue is what lets me keep teaching, keep building and keep showing up for the people this book was written for.

It is my blood, sweat and tears. The last thing I would ever want is to be robbed of it.

So I did something about it. On November 4, 2026, I signed The AI Translator on the Trust Identity Protocol, and it became the first book registered on TIP. The record declares the book’s Amazon listing Original Human and ties that claim to my verified identity with a post-quantum signature. Anyone can check it, free. Copies may still exist. Copies always will. But the original, and the person behind it, can always be found and checked.

That is my mark. My legacy. A story my grandchildren will read one day, and know it came from me.

Someone can steal a copy. They cannot change who signed it first.

A signature built for the quantum age

The technology is called the Trust Identity Protocol, or TIP®, an open protocol from The AI Lab. Its purpose is to let people prove that the work they make is theirs.

Here is how it works, in plain words.

• You verify once. A one-time identity check issues you a TIP-ID, a signed proof that you are you. Your raw biometric data is never stored. Your signing keys stay encrypted on your own device, unlocked by your fingerprint or face.
• You sign your work. Each piece of content gets a CTID, or Content TIP ID, a permanent public record of who made it, when, how it was made, and a fingerprint of the content itself. A work signed this way becomes a Verifiable Asset.
• Anyone can check. No account is needed. Change one word and the fingerprint no longer matches, so any tampering shows.

The creator also declares how the work was made, as Original Human, AI-Assisted, AI-Generated or Mixed. That declaration is tied to a verified identity, so it stays on the record under that person’s name.

Now back to the crypto miner. Like a blockchain, TIP keeps its records on a network of nodes rather than on one company’s server, and any node can check any record. The difference is what gets recorded. Not coins. Authorship.

And here is the quantum part. TIP is built to stay secure on both sides of Q-Day. It signs with ML-DSA-65, the post-quantum signature standard NIST published as FIPS 204 in August 2024, and its specification uses NIST’s post-quantum standards for both encryption and signatures. Every record is permanent and can’t be secretly changed. Someone can steal a copy. They cannot change who signed it first.

Two honest limits, because trust depends on honesty. TIP proves origin, not truth. It shows who made something, not that every word is right. And TIP does not stop copying. It makes sure the original, and the person behind it, can always be found. It doesn’t replace a copyright filing either. It gives you a dated, checkable record that sits alongside one.

To every author, journalist and filmmaker

You don’t need to understand quantum physics to protect your work. You need to act before the copies outnumber you.

• Sign your work when you make it. The earlier the record, the stronger your claim to being first.
• Start with what matters most. Your book, your manuscript, your signature articles, your trailer.
• Be transparent about AI. If AI helped you, say so. Saying so is part of being trusted.
• Keep your legal protections. File your copyright and trademarks too. A signed record works alongside them.
• Make it a habit. Every new piece, every new edition.

The kill switch isn’t coming. The copies aren’t going away. But your name can stay attached to your work for as long as it exists.

The libraries of Alexandria and Nalanda burned, and with them much of the knowledge of their age. Our work doesn’t burn anymore. It gets copied, altered and drowned out until no one can tell the original from the imitation. A world that can’t tell who made what slowly loses its memory.

I refuse to let my work be lost that way. I hope you will too.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can an author prove they wrote a book when AI can copy it?

By signing it with a verified record of origin when it is made. The Trust Identity Protocol (TIP) gives each work a permanent, checkable record of who made it, when and how, tied to a verified identity.

What is Q-Day and why should authors care?

Q-Day is the day a quantum computer can break today’s common encryption and digital signatures. A proof of authorship signed with those older methods could later be forged. TIP signs with ML-DSA-65, NIST’s post-quantum signature standard, which is designed to resist that threat.

Does TIP stop people from copying my book?

No. It makes sure the original, and the person behind it, can always be found and checked, wherever copies travel.

Is TIP the same as copyright?

No. Copyright is a legal right. TIP is a dated, verifiable record of origin. They work best together.

Can I use TIP if AI helped me write?

Yes. Creators declare how a work was made, as Original Human, AI-Assisted, AI-Generated or Mixed. TIP is transparent about AI, not against it.

Where can I learn more?

Read how the Trust Identity Protocol works at theailab.org/trust-identity-protocol. The TIP specification is published openly on GitHub.

Sources

• NPR, “Anthropic to pay authors $1.5B to settle lawsuit over pirated chatbot training material” (September 5, 2025)
• Gidney and Ekerå, “How to factor 2048 bit RSA integers in 8 hours using 20 million noisy qubits,” arXiv 1905.09749 (2019)
• Gidney, “How to factor 2048 bit RSA integers with less than a million noisy qubits,” arXiv 2505.15917 (May 2025)
• Global Risk Institute, Quantum Threat Timeline Report 2025
• NIST FIPS 204, Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Standard (August 13, 2024)
• NIST IR 8547 (initial public draft), Transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards
• CNBC via NBC Connecticut, Bill Gates on AI replacing many doctors and teachers within 10 years
• Fox Business, Musk predicts AI will create “universal high income”
• TIP record for The AI Translator, OH-1536b1f18c9f99-31b8
• Trust Identity Protocol Whitepaper v1.1
• TIP specification on GitHub
• Dinesh Mendhe, Announcing the Trust Identity Protocol

Hema Dey is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Iffel International Inc., author of The AI Translator and Vice Chair of the AI Trust Council of The AI Lab.

Read how the Trust Identity Protocol works, or sign your own work at vp.theailab.org.