Book bans reached an all-time high this year as political pressure and AI fuel a spike in titles taken off the shelves. Almost 12,000 books were banned between 2025 and 2026, a 5,000-book jump from the previous year, according to a Monday report by PEN America, a free-speech organization. The vast majority of the book bans are coming out of Texas and Florida, with an estimated 8,100 and 3,200 titles revoked, respectively.

"The fact that a huge number, a strong majority, I would say, of the bans that we calculated in Texas and Florida — we were only able to find out about because of public information requests," said Philomena Polefrone, senior manager for Freedom to Read at PEN America, adding it has become difficult to count book bans based on local reporting. "We have needed to pivot a little bit and start going directly to the source for information.

And so, I would also say that the fact that Texas and Florida are very overrepresented in our report this year doesn't indicate that there aren't bans in other states. It indicates that we have better information in Texas and Florida," Polefrone added. Republicans in Florida and Texas have prioritized education reform, including sweeping efforts to get certain books out of classrooms and libraries. Part of the jump is likely due to a law in Texas that went into effect September 2025 that restricted sexually explicit or harmful content in school libraries and gave parents greater access to what was in those libraries.

Through a public records request, the Texas Freedom to Read Project found multiple schools using AI to vet books.

In some cases, AI recommended removing a book because another district had removed it and not because it actually included obscene material. "This is the first time that we have direct evidence of" AI use in our report, Polefrone said.

"And I think that it comes out of that situation of fear that I was describing, where administrators and librarians know that they don't have the resources to ... review each book that some of these laws demand," she added. "They don't have the capacity to go through each one individually and reread it essentially and consider it in its entirety." In a distant third to Texas and Florida is Ohio with 117 bans, though PEN American believes the numbers point to an undercount in most states. In Iowa, a law was passed in 2023 that said school districts can only keep "age-appropriate materials" in their library.

A second violation of this law at a district could send a school employee to a hearing that can result in professional sanctions. And in Utah, a book can be put on a statewide banned list, meaning it has to be pulled from all classrooms. "We've also seen even some blue states ... like even New York itself here, where we've actually seen and surveyed New York educators and found that they, too, feel nervous about books, and they have preemptively been making choices: either removing books that they have on their shelves because they're afraid a parent could complain" or avoiding buying certain titles altogether, said Skip Dye, senior vice president at Penguin Random House and chair of the group's Intellectual Freedom Task Force.

The group has also noticed the rise of AI as educators navigate laws around which books are allowed in classrooms, highlighting how the technology could incorrectly flag books for removal. "I do know that some school boards and some educators have been using AI tools to go through and scan books to go and look for possible books" that could violate state law, Dye said. AI sometimes pulls up certain phrases in a book that could be "troublesome" based on state law without "looking at what is the context of those words in the book," leading to false conclusions about its appropriateness for schools, he added. Efforts to push back against book bans have been fought out in courts with mixed results.

In Iowa, its 2023 law was temporarily halted before the Eighth Circuit reversed that decision of the lower court and allowed the legislation to be implemented. In Florida, attorney Corey Stoughton is representing a student and the authors of "And Tango Makes Three," a children's book about two male penguins raising a chick together, after it was pulled from a state school. Stoughton recently argued the case before the Eleventh Circuit to appeal a previous ruling allowing the book ban. "The district court, rather than examining whether the school district's reasons for removing that book were legitimate, or instead, just, you know, viewpoint discrimination against the idea of tolerance for adoptive families, adoptive gay families, the court held, really rather shockingly, that the First Amendment does not apply at all when it comes to school decisions about library books on the shelves," Stoughton told The Hill.

And while the issue is fought in the courts, book ban opponents are also encouraging people to do the work on the ground to oppose titles getting struck either by law or self-censorship. "I think a lot of it is just about building awareness about the issue, letting people know that this isn't just happening in a couple states, it's probably happening in your state, and getting out there and supporting libraries and remembering that libraries are wonderful, joyful places," said Sarah Lamdan, director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom.