Medium Opens TK to Writers With Inline AI Assistance

By Grace Kim

Medium made TK free for account holders on November 9, 2026, ending the invite-only phase for the private notebook and writing app. The broader rollout followed a September 16, 2026 Medium post that offered TK by invitation or to Friends of Medium while the company prepared wider access.

Tony Stubblebine, Medium’s chief executive, described the division between the products: “TK is the gym and Medium is the stage.” TK remains separate from Medium’s publishing platform, according to the company’s announcement.

What does TK add inside the draft?

Medium said the first version includes:

• A mobile app and widgets for voice and text capture.
• Imports from Medium archives, as well as Bear or Obsidian vaults.
• Markdown import and export.

The first version has no native desktop app, and Stubblebine said Medium wants to add one.

The app embeds an @TK assistant in the editor. Medium says writers can type @TK in the middle of a sentence to check a fact or retrieve earlier work without leaving the draft. The command adapts Medium’s publishing placeholder, TK, which means “to come” and marks information a writer has left unfinished. Here, the placeholder triggers the assistant rather than simply flagging missing copy.

Medium said TK’s AI feedback covers editorial and headline suggestions, compares drafts with Medium publications’ style guides, and flags material that could be organized into a book. The company says TK will not write a user’s essay; it is meant to support the writer’s own work.

Medium said TK also creates a writing prompt each morning, and that prompt can refer back to earlier notes. Searches, topics, tags and libraries can become wiki-style summaries with themes, key ideas and links to underlying notes. Medium says the format gives an unstructured archive a route back into later drafts.

In practical terms, TK brings research and critique into the editor while leaving the essay in the writer’s hands.

How do agents, sharing and provenance work?

Medium said TK includes an MCP server and Claude skill so personal AI agents can draw on a user’s stored positions, projects and unfinished ideas.

Medium’s Claude Daily Note plugin shows the connection. With TK’s MCP server connected in Claude Cowork or Claude Code, the plugin creates one document per day, updates it in place and carries unchecked to-do items forward. Medium says the plugin’s targeted edit operations are designed to preserve live edits, existing checkbox states and the user’s writing.

Medium said TK’s social libraries let writers share drafts with groups. Its open libraries support public journaling, feedback before publication and the development of a self-published book. Medium says notes otherwise remain private, with users controlling access permissions, and that no AI company trains on or uses a person’s writing without permission.

Medium says published TK notes can disclose which material was human-written and which was AI-written. Users can inspect the provenance down to the prompts and source material involved.

Together, the tools put permission, sharing and disclosure at the center of agent-assisted writing rather than making an AI company the default custodian of a draft.

What does Medium’s writing survey show?

Medium’s State of Writing Report 2026 found that AI use remained widespread alongside deep distrust of its output. In a Harris Poll survey for Medium:

• 71% of surveyed writers had used AI in their writing practice during the previous three months.
• 60% distrusted their own AI-produced writing.
• 69% distrusted AI-produced writing from others.

The Harris Poll conducted the online U.S. survey for Medium from August 12–17, 2026 among 1,175 writers. Medium reported full-sample precision of 4.0 percentage points using a 95% Bayesian credible interval.

Medium counted 4.4 million unpublished drafts written on its platform over the preceding year. The company linked that volume to TK’s decision to treat private writing as the default and sharing as a later choice. Medium also presents its provenance tools as a response to the distrust documented in the survey.

Medium’s next test is whether visible provenance and controlled sharing can ease that trust gap while the writer retains authorship and control over disclosure.