Clay takes its AI-writing policy company-wide

Clay co-founder Varun Anand said the company had extended an internal AI-writing policy, written by engineer Sophie Alpert, from the engineering team to the whole company after other departments found it useful. The policy sets out four principles staff are expected to follow when using AI tools to draft documents.

The core requirement is ownership: employees must “stand behind every idea and sentence” in anything they publish, regardless of how much AI assistance went into producing it. The other principles argue that writing is itself a way of thinking — that skipping the writing process by generating text from a prompt leaves the author with a shallower understanding of the material — and that padding a short idea into a long AI-generated document wastes readers’ time rather than respecting it; the policy suggests sharing the prompt itself instead of an inflated document in some cases.

The policy is notable less for its content, which echoes writing advice that predates generative AI, than for a company formalising it as an official standard rather than leaving norms around AI-assisted writing to individual judgement — a step few companies had taken publicly by mid-2026, as generative writing tools became routine in everyday office work.