Medium opened TK, a free private notebook and writing app with AI assistance, to everyone with a Medium account on Nov. 9, 2026. Medium says the first version includes a mobile app, and The Verge lists apps for the web, Android and iOS. The launch moves the company known for public blogging toward writing that stays private or is shared only with small groups.
What is Medium TK?
In a Medium blog post, CEO Tony Stubblebine called TK "a private notebook" and wrote that "Anyone with a Medium account can join."
The first version includes a writing experience, a mobile app, mobile widgets that capture voice and text, instant import of everything you have written on Medium, and imports of vaults from Bear and Obsidian. TK imports Markdown and exports it for any single note or for your whole archive. TK itself is cloud-based rather than Markdown-based, a design Medium connects to collaboration.
TK ships without a native desktop app. Medium says it wants to fix that.
Stubblebine summed up the split between the two products: "TK is the gym and Medium is the stage." He told The Verge, "I don't think we've actually had a launch of anything important since 2017."
How does @TK work?
AI assistance sits inside the editor. You type @TK in the middle of a sentence and ask a question or make a request. Medium's examples include "@TK is September 30 days or 31?" and "@TK can you pull in the paragraph that I wrote yesterday about writing and thinking?" The name comes from the placeholder writers leave in drafts, short for "To Come."
Beyond questions, Medium says it wants writing prompts to be everywhere in TK, and those prompts refer to your past writing. Unite.AI reports a new prompt arrives each morning. AI skills give editorial and headline feedback, match a draft to the style guides of Medium publications, and notice if your writing could be organized into a book. Medium says TK's AI is "more like a writing coach" and does not generate your writing for you, according to its September 2026 TK FAQ. Any search, topic, tag or library can also be summarized into a wiki-style page with main themes, an index of key ideas and links back to the notes.
TK ships with an MCP server and a Claude skill so an AI agent can know, in Medium's words, "your positions, your projects, your half-finished thoughts."
What are TK's social libraries?
Libraries add a private blogging layer on top of notes. Three open libraries ship at launch: Public Journal, Get Feedback on Your Writing, and Write a Book. The Verge described TK as "an ultra-minimalist take on Evernote" and as "blogging meets group chats."
Libraries are private and have no public face, The Verge reports. In the early libraries The Verge saw, groups share book projects, recipes and poetry drafts. Collaborators can write, comment and leave emoji reactions, and you can share a piece through a link or by email, the way you would share a Google Doc. Medium says you set the access control permissions. According to The Verge, TK does not measure pageviews.
Is TK free?
TK is free for anyone with a Medium account, according to Medium and TechCrunch. Before this wider opening, TK was invite-only or open to Friends of Medium, according to a Medium post from Sept. 16, 2026. Medium has been profitable since August 2024.
Stubblebine also wondered aloud to The Verge whether Medium could one day package the best library content and charge people, or AI agents, for access. He framed it as a question, not an announced plan.
Does Medium train AI on your writing?
Medium states a flat rule: "No AI company ever trains on your writing or uses it without your permission." Notes can also be published with transparency about what was human written and what was AI written.
The tradeoff is encryption. TechCrunch reports that writing in TK is not encrypted because the app is designed for collaboration. Notes live in Medium's cloud rather than as local files, so privacy rests on the access permissions you set and on Medium's policy, not on end-to-end encryption. TechCrunch also notes that TK leans into a debated area, since authors have lost book deals over suspected AI use.
Who is TK for?
TK fits journalers and everyday writers who want a private place to capture voice notes, answer writing prompts and draft without publishing. Writers with an existing Medium archive can import everything at once, then use the AI to search and make sense of it. Bear and Obsidian users can move their vaults in. People workshopping a book or an essay can use libraries for small-group feedback, and Claude users can connect an agent to their notes through the MCP server.
It is a weaker fit for writers who need a native desktop app, a Markdown-first workflow built on local files, or encrypted notes. None of those are in the first version, though Markdown import and export are.
For other writing apps and assistants, see our list of the best AI tools for writers.
Why did Medium build TK?
The Verge points out that search engines and chatbots send less and less traffic back to the web, and Medium relies on Google for much of its traffic. Stubblebine said that when Google started taking that traffic away, he told Google what his product roadmap would do: "I'm going to switch to private blogging." "We're just going to take everything underground."
TK is that switch in product form. Writing happens privately or inside chosen groups instead of on the open web, and publishing to Medium remains the option for work writers want to make public.
Sources
- TK, a new private notebook app from Medium (Medium, Tony Stubblebine, Nov. 9, 2026)
- How 12 writers are using TK to write more (and what they've learned) (Medium, Sept. 16, 2026)
- Medium is launching a new note-taking app called TK (The Verge, David Pierce, Nov. 9, 2026)
- Medium's new TK app brings AI assistance directly into the writing process (TechCrunch, Sarah Perez, Nov. 9, 2026)
- Medium opens TK notebook to writers with inline AI assistance (Unite.AI, an article generated by an AI research agent and reviewed by Unite.AI editors)
