Games Workshop is famously anti-AI, but I was still caught by surprise when the narrator of my new favorite Warhammer 40,000 audiobook read out a warning about training AI systems on the novel itself.
AI models training on books without permission has become one of the big topics in the tech space. Last week, a report by 404 Media alleged that Amazon was buying “massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.”
Last summer, it emerged that Anthropic had shredded millions of physical books to train its Claude AI model. The secret initiative, called Project Panama, was unearthed in a lawsuit brought by a group of authors against Anthropic, which eventually agreed to settle for $1.5 billion despite the ruling largely siding with the AI company on fair use.
And in October last year, a federal court advanced two new theories of infringement against ChatGPT-owner OpenAI in a lawsuit brought by authors including Game of Thrones’ George R.R. Martin. No final summary judgment ruling has been issued yet.
Games Workshop’s websites are plastered with AI warnings. The Black Library website, which is the official home of Games Workshop’s book business, carries the message: “Any use of website content to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is expressly prohibited.” There are detailed AI warnings in the legal sections of Games Workshop websites, too.
But it was at the end of audiobook version of Robert Rath’s superb Necrons novel, The Wicked and The Warped, that I was surprised to hear narrator Richard Reed himself read out a crystal clear AI warning: “This recording is copyrighted to Games Workshop 2026. All rights reserved. May not be used or reproduced in any manner for text and datamining activities, or developing or training artificial intelligence models or systems.”
That’s the first time I’ve heard an AI warning actually read out by a Black Library narrator (I’m not sure if it’s the first, but there is no warning read out at the end of the audiobook version of Dan Abnett’s Hive, which released in May).
It is in keeping with Games Workshop’s messaging on AI so far. In January, Games Workshop banned the use of AI in its content production and design process, insisting that none of its senior managers were currently excited about the technology. Then, in July, Games Workshop reiterated its anti-AI stance, and revealed it had launched investigations into recent marketing gaffes that some suspected were AI, to ensure staff were playing by internal rules.
“As noted in our November 2025 half year report, we are not being complacent on the topic, we are carefully monitoring what others are saying and doing,” Games Workshop CEO Kevin Rountree said of at the time.
“We are not using AI at Games Workshop in our product design nor on the creation of our IP, this will protect the integrity and ownership of our IP. We have made a few human errors on the depiction of our products in our product marketing in the year, they were investigated fully to ensure that AI had not been used and that all our staff are following our internal policies.”
The question is, can Games Workshop actually do anything to prevent AI companies from training their models on its books? The tech world argues fair use when it comes to hoovering up content, not just from books but from pretty much all creative output. So far, despite the high-profile lawsuits and investigative reports, that approach appears to be working. So, to truly test Games Workshop’s resolve here, it would probably have to issue a lawsuit against an AI company itself, or at least threaten one with legal action if it believes its content has been used to train a model.
And there is evidence to suggest AI models are trained on Warhammer books. In March 2025, an investigation by The Atlantic found that Meta allegedly pirated millions of books to train its AI. Black Library authors were among those subsequently horrified to discover that their novels were in LibGen, the pirated-books database that Meta used to train AI. A quick search shows pretty much all of Robert Rath’s Warhammer novels are in there.
Meanwhile, fake AI-generated Warhammer books have become a real problem, with unlicensed Warhammer 40,000 books complete with clearly AI-generated covers and apparent AI-generated text available on various retailers.
Games Workshop boss Kevin Rountree recently admitted that AI was automatically included in third-party software “whether we like it or not,” which makes it difficult for Games Workshop to say definitively that it is not using AI outside of its own Warhammer studio. This is “something we are just going to have to potentially live with and monitor,” Rountree added.
“We are proud to deliver consistent great returns employing great people (many of them hobbyists themselves) celebrating with other hobbyists in the real world,” he continued. “Our business performance is still built on staff development and hard work with very little waste.”
Image credit: Games Workshop.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
