Frankfurter Buchmesse 2026: EU AI Act Gives Publishers Leverage, but No Teeth - Publishing Perspectives

At the Frankfurt Book Fair 2026, RELX's Elizabeth Crossick has described the EU AI Act as 'market-access legislation' — which is lobbying-speak for a velvet rope. Print the transparency notice on your training data, slap a label on the AI-generated content, and the European single market opens like a hotel lift. Risk tiers, apparently. Nothing says 'binding safety regime' quite like a system that grades your compliance by the shape of the form you didn't fill in. Crossick's description is technically accurate, which is rather the problem.

Hence the Frankfurt Appeal, in which publishers formally request that policymakers make the existing rules effective before adding new ones. That is the entire ask. Not enforcement, not fines, not a single named regulator with a phone that rings — just a polite note asking whether the law that already exists might, at some point, do something. What the Appeal actually requests is that the rules already on the books, with their risk tiers and their transparency duties, be made to apply to the companies that trained on the books in the first place. The headline concedes the whole game: leverage, but no teeth. Leverage over whom, exactly? The models have already read the books.

Still, 'leverage' is doing a lot of work in Frankfurt this week. Publishers have discovered that a regulation with no enforcement mechanism is nevertheless a magnificent thing to wave around in a negotiation, rather like brandishing a library card at a burglar. Crossick's framing is honest enough about the instrument — market access — while the appeal is honest about the outcome — nothing. Meanwhile the training data remains unexamined, the labels remain a sticker on the spine, and the books remain, in every sense that matters, already consumed. Cheerful stuff for a trade fair with complimentary coffee.