Medium’s new app tries to save the platform from irrelevance

A personal essay, a tutorial, or an argument that’s been knocking around in someone’s head for weeks can all find a home on Medium. Now the platform wants to be part of what happens before those pieces are ready to publish — when a writer is still sorting through notes or sending an early draft to a friend.

On Nov. 9, Medium launched TK, a free writing and note-taking app for people with a Medium account. TK has an AI assistant built into the editor that can answer questions or give feedback as writers draft. It also lets writers share work in small groups where others can leave comments, swap notes, or contribute writing of their own.

It’s goal, according to CEO of Medium Tony Stubblebine, is to “craft writing that compounds into deep thinking, which creates influence across your entire world. What shape is that influence? We’re still figuring that out, but we know it starts with humans writing more.”

“We’ve designed TK for three goals: Easy to write. Easy to think. Easy to feel like your writing matters,” he added.

The launch comes as the internet has changed. Medium relies on Google to send readers to its articles (44 percent of their traffic, specifically), and Stubblebine said those referrals declined “When Google started taking away all the traffic.” He warned the company in an interview with The Verge that “this hurts us, but it also hurts you.” Though Medium is profitable since 2024, iterating must be done to compete with both other publishing platforms (like Substack) and social media.

Stubblebine’s response is to give writers a way to reach readers without relying on Google. With TK, they can share drafts directly with people in private groups. ‘We’re just going to take everything underground,” he told The Verge.

Beyond Medium, in an analysis of March 2025 browsing data, Pew Research Center found that users clicked a traditional search result on 8 percent of Google visits with an AI summary, compared with 15 percent of visits without one.

For those who don’t see the letters everyday (like me), “TK” is used by writers and editors to mark something in their work that’s still to come, like a date that needs checking or a quote that needs dropping in. In Medium’s app, typing @TK calls up an assistant that can answer a quick question or find a paragraph the writer saved the day before. Medium says the assistant can also give headline and editorial feedback, compare drafts with Medium publications’ style guides, and pull related notes into summaries that link back to the originals. Writers can import their Medium archives or bring over notes from Bear and Obsidian. An optional Claude integration lets an outside agent work with the notebook, too.

The human version of that feedback happens in what TK calls Libraries. A Library can be a space for a few friends to share work in progress, and Medium is also opening groups for journaling, getting feedback on drafts, and working toward a self-published book. A draft can stay private, go to a handful of readers, or eventually make its way to Medium’s publishing platform. According to Stubblebine, “TK is the gym and Medium is the stage.”

That division makes for an awkward question: The company wants people to do more of their own writing while putting AI a few keystrokes away from every unfinished sentence. Looking up a date is one thing, but asking AI for feedback on a paragraph can get a lot closer to outsourcing writing abilities. Medium adds that TK lets writers disclose which material came from AI and show the prompts and source material behind it, and maintains the service is not anti-AI, but pro-human:

“Much of the AI industry is betting that machines will do our thinking for us, and some of its leaders talk as if writing no longer matters. We’re betting the other way. We’re not anti-AI, we’re pro-human—and that’s why we built TK”

Other publishing platforms are finding uses for AI, too. Substack can turn a podcast recording into an editable transcript or suggest short clips from a video for creators to share on Notes or Instagram. And as Mashable reported in July, Substack also gives readers “Scan for AI text” option. The tool, powered by Pangram, estimates how much of a published post was written by a human, generated by AI, or written with AI assistance.

The app comes in a literary world that has been inundated with AI. In a 2026 survey Medium conducted with The Harris Poll, 71 percent of writers said they’d used AI in their writing process in the previous three months, yet 69 percent said they distrusted AI-assisted writing from others. TK brings AI closer into the writing process than ever before. Having an assistant a few keystrokes away could make it easier to churn out more AI slop…or the app could do what Stubblebine hopes and get writers sharing rough drafts and working through ideas together. As someone who reads a lot of AI slop these days, I’ll be hoping for the latter.