Publishers built the knowledge base AI depends on

Every AI answer draws on someone's work. A textbook chapter. A peer-reviewed study. A cookbook perfected over decades. This knowledge didn't materialize from nowhere—people spent years creating it.

Left unchecked, AI severs the link between creation and reward. If machines can generate text that mimics human knowledge, what incentive remains to write the textbook, fund the research, or perfect the recipe? This isn't just a business problem for publishers. It's an existential question for human creativity itself.

The answer isn't to resist AI. It's to build new infrastructure that makes creation sustainable. That means restoring four things that AI has disrupted:

That's what Cashmere builds: the systems that let publishers engage with AI on their own terms—with all four in place from the start.

Before Cashmere, our founders—Munk, Wyatt, and Jonathan—built bespoke professional development programs for corporate L&D teams. Every program was handcrafted around curated books and content. It worked, but it was slow and expensive.

AI promised to change that. But when they tried to bring publisher content into AI workflows, nothing was set up for it. The data was messy. The licensing was messier. And the plumbing connecting publisher content to AI platforms? It didn't exist.

What existed had been built for a different era—search engines, web pages, human readers clicking links. AI needed something new: systems that could structure content, enforce licensing, and handle payments at scale. Systems that worked for publishers and AI platforms equally. That's what Cashmere became.