PEN America says AI amplified record wave of U.S. school book bans

PEN America recorded nearly 12,000 book bans affecting more than 7,300 individual titles in U.S. schools during the 2025-26 school year, the highest number of censorship cases it has documented. Texas accounted for more than 8,100 of the bans, about three-quarters of the national total, while Florida recorded more than 3,200. The organisation said artificial intelligence was used by Texas officials to generate a recommended list of books for removal, contributing to the scale of the state's bans. In some instances, its report found, AI recommended books already barred elsewhere, creating a “snowball effect” around frequently challenged titles. PEN America attributed the Texas surge to Senate Bill 13, passed in 2025, which it said prohibited a broad range of books deemed “profane” or “indecent” by censorship proponents. The Texas Education Agency says the law also established new requirements for school-library materials and catalogs, including parental access to catalogs, parent restrictions on their children's access to titles, district acquisition policies and written challenges to library materials. The scale marked a sharp change from the earlier cited 2023-24 school year, when Texas had banned about 540 books, according to PEN America figures cited by Houston Public Media. Florida, then the national leader, recorded more than 4,500 bans in 2023-24. Sold, Patricia McCormick's 2006 young-adult novel about a Nepalese teenager sold into sexual slavery, was the country's most frequently banned book in the latest count. Stephen King was the most frequently banned individual author. Kasey Meehan of PEN America said restricting popular young-adult books was especially damaging amid a wider decline in reading. Schools should be connecting children to “engaging stories and formats,” she said, rather than removing books that help them recognise themselves in literature and understand others. Philomena Polefrone of Florida Freedom to Read said state politicians' directives had created confusion and fear in school districts. “Unsure how to comply, districts are removing books en masse, sometimes with the ‘help’ of crude AI tools that only make the problem worse,” she said. Separately, 404 Media reported in April that conservative parents' advocacy groups had tested commercial AI systems to identify books they considered pornographic, despite errors that resulted in non-pornographic titles being flagged. One such tool, BLOCKADE, produces book reports from PDF and EPUB files through xAI or OpenAI application-programming-interface keys. Its script scores roughly 300 words for severity and calculates an appropriateness score; its definition of “educational inappropriateness” is content that offends conservative values. The generated reports are designed to be attached to formal book challenges. In Texas, New Braunfels Independent School District invested in AI screening for material that might violate state book laws, particularly SB 12 and SB 13, according to 404 Media. The district fast-tracked a BookmarkED contract worth nearly $9,000 while describing its use as exploratory, and a librarian said the system appeared to flag more content with each run rather than assessing whether material was pervasive throughout a book. The Texas Freedom to Read Project said New Braunfels had removed more than 1,400 books across its schools and had indefinitely suspended new purchases. The Texas State Library and Archives Commission was required under SB 13 to update its school-library collection-development rules by April 1, 2026.