Trip Adler

A cash register for the things AI reads

Somewhere right now, a large language model is reading a novel it never paid for. Trip Adler noticed the same thing - and instead of reaching for a lawyer, he reached for a spreadsheet. Created by Humans, the company he started in 2024, is the toll booth he is bolting onto the road between writers and the AI labs racing down it.

The premise is almost suspiciously simple. Authors own rights. AI companies want those rights. There has never been a clean, standardized place to do that deal. So Adler is building one - a marketplace where a rights holder can list a book, set terms, and collect a check when an AI company licenses it for training, reference, or transformation. No subpoenas. No moral panic. Just a price and a handshake, executed at internet scale.

It is a strikingly calm position to take in the loudest fight in technology. While newsrooms sue, novelists organize, and AI executives mutter about fair use, Adler keeps repeating a word that sounds almost out of place: bridge. He is not interested in who is right. He is interested in who gets paid.

If nobody builds the market, almost nobody gets paid

Adler's argument is economic before it is ethical. The AI giants have already started cutting checks - News Corp, Reddit, a handful of large publishers signed deals worth real money. But most writers have no door to knock on. Without infrastructure, the windfall flows to whoever has lawyers on retainer and leaves everyone else watching from the sidewalk.

His read on the buyers is blunt and, coming from a man who has spent two decades pitching, oddly credible: "The big companies like OpenAI and Apple and Google and others are our potential buyers. We've talked to all of them, they're quite interested." The reason, he says, is not charity. It is product quality. Give an AI lab clean, curated, rights-cleared content "in a plug-'n'-play way, and they're going to pay for it." In an arms race where everyone has scraped the same messy internet, the next edge is licensed material nobody else can legally touch.

Asimov had three laws. Adler wrote a fourth.

Isaac Asimov gave his robots three laws to keep them from hurting people. Adler proposes a fourth for the age of generative models, and it fits on a bumper sticker: AI can learn from a human only if the human benefits. Underneath that line sits a five-part scaffolding he uses to define what "AI rights" actually mean in practice.

It is a tidy bit of framing, and it does real work. It reframes the whole debate away from "stop the robots" and toward "civilize the robots." Authors who sign on are not surrendering to AI; they are setting the terms of engagement. The platform launched its public beta for book authors in January 2025 in partnership with the Authors Guild - the same organization that has been suing AI companies. Adler managed to stand next to the plaintiffs and the defendants at the same time, and sell both a way out.

It started with a paper nobody would publish

Adler grew up in Palo Alto, which is to startups roughly what Florence was to frescoes. His father, John R. Adler, is a Stanford neurosurgeon and the inventor of the CyberKnife - so dinner-table conversation ran toward both medicine and invention. One of those conversations became a company. The elder Adler was frustrated trying to get an academic paper into a medical journal, and his son wondered why publishing anything had to be so hard. The answer, eventually, was Scribd.

He studied biophysics at Harvard - not computer science, not business - and surfed for the university's team, competing in the first Ivy League Surf Championships in May 2003. In the summer of 2006 he and classmate Jared Friedman took the idea to Y Combinator. In March 2007 they launched Scribd out of a San Francisco apartment, putting documents online when "putting documents online" was still a genuine problem worth solving.

That detail tells you more than any pitch deck. The man tasked with digitizing the written word started by busking for it. Scribd grew anyway - past 100 million users, through a hard pivot from free uploads to paid subscriptions, into the kind of quietly enduring business that lands a founder on TIME's tech pioneers list in 2010 and Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2014. He ran it for sixteen years, stepping back as CEO in 2023.

Twenty years, two companies, one move

The vocabulary of a bridge builder

See the pitch in two minutes

Giant Ideas at the Tate Modern, and a longer conversation on AI and copyright.

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