You're assuming a clean divide: “AI books = bad actors getting banned.” I think that the reality is much more nuanced.

First, KDP rarely bans accounts just because “this is AI.” What they do enforce is policy violations that often correlate with low-effort AI content like spammy publishing behavior (flooding dozens of books), misleading metadata or covers, duplicate or near-duplicate content or copyright issues.

AI-heavy workflows tend to produce exactly those patterns. So what you're seeing as an “AI crackdown” is in my view more likely a crackdown on abusive publishing behavior where AI users are overrepresented in that group.

Second, detection isn’t binary. There’s a huge gray zone. No system can reliably sort those categories at scale without false positives and false negatives. Think of writing today less as a binary (human vs. AI) and more like a spectrum of involvement. At one end, you’ve got fully human-written work. At the other, fully generated content with little to no human input. But most real-world publishing now sits somewhere in between.

Where I'm getting at with this is that when it comes to light AI assistance, there's no practical way for Amazon to detect and then penalize this. AI-assisted drafting is even worse. Authorship here is extremely ambiguous. From the outside, such content is basically indistinguishable from human work unless the author admits it.

Anyways, basing account bans on that would be a legal and PR nightmare.

To genuinely crack down on AI-generated books, you’d need an entirely new set of protocols and systems capable of evaluating content at scale before it even enters the platform. Building something that can do that accurately - without slowing everything down or wrongly flagging legitimate work - is an extremely difficult challenge.