Clay rolls out company-wide AI writing policy that lets staff use AI but makes them answer for every line

Clay, an AI sales and go-to-market platform, has introduced a formal AI writing policy across the company, setting rules for any employee who uses AI to draft text that others will read. According to co-founder Varun Anand, the policy was first written by Sophie Alpert for the engineering team and was later adopted company-wide after other teams found it useful. The policy is built around four principles. First, employees must stand behind every idea and every sentence that appears under their name. Clay says staff cannot excuse unclear wording by saying AI generated it. Second, the company argues that writing is part of thinking: deciding what matters, how to structure an argument, and how to explain a problem clearly is itself part of understanding the problem. Third, Clay says more time should be spent authoring a document than consuming it, warning against using a short prompt to create a long document that imposes reading costs on many coworkers. Fourth, the company says longer documents are not inherently better, noting that generative AI can produce polished but low-information text at scale. Anand said that in some cases, if a long document comes from a very short prompt, it may make more sense to share the prompt itself.