Gruffalo illustrator Axel Scheffler weighs legal action over AI

"I just want them to stop"

Axel Scheffler, the illustrator of The Gruffalo, says he is "seriously considering" legal action against artificial intelligence companies that he says breach his copyright by reproducing his work, Matt Gravelling reported for BBC London.

"I've been in touch with a lawyer in Germany," Scheffler said. He said other illustrators had already taken legal action against AI companies. "I just want them to stop."

The artist, who lives in south London, did not name any company that his legal team might pursue. He said any action would not be about compensation, but about protecting creators now and in the future.

AI companies have argued in the past that using copyrighted material to train their models does not necessarily amount to copyright infringement, the BBC noted.

Matt Gravelling reported this first for BBC News. Checked against BBC News: Gruffalo illustrator considering legal action against AI firms.

How he found out

Scheffler does not own a smartphone, and said he had tried to ignore AI until someone showed him how his most famous characters had been recreated digitally in settings such as Silicon Valley and Oktoberfest.

"I was quite shocked," he told the BBC. "It's clearly my mouse, my Gruffalo, as close as they can do it." The rest of each image, he said, was completely invented, but the result was "a clear theft of copyright".

It is a direct challenge to the way image generators work. A user types a request, and the system produces a new picture drawing on what it learned from the huge number of images it was trained on. Artists argue that when the result is recognisably their character, their work has been copied without permission.

Why Germany

Scheffler, who was born in Germany, is considering bringing the case there because he believes the European Union is more friendly to creators, the BBC reported.

Nick Buckland, an intellectual property lawyer at the London firm Lewis Silkin, agreed that Germany could offer a route for creators trying to protect their work. He told the BBC there had been two cases there in which music collecting societies had won against AI companies by showing that the companies had copied song lyrics word for word and presented them to users.

He warned that proving infringement would not be easy. A distinctive character such as the Gruffalo could help, he said, but Scheffler would still need to show that his copyright had been infringed. "Generative AI doesn't copy, it trains," Buckland explained, adding that this was the argument AI companies used to say they were not infringing anyone's copyright.

He gave the example of someone asking for a picture of a dog. The system draws on the millions of pictures of dogs it has been trained on, he said, and then presents one to the user.

The songwriters who won in Munich

The best known of those German cases was brought by GEMA, the German music rights society, which represents more than 100,000 composers, songwriters and publishers. In November 2025 a court in Munich ruled that OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, had infringed copyright by using song lyrics without licences, Jan Mueller and Femke Colborne reported for the news agency AFP.

GEMA had filed the case in November 2024 on behalf of the writers of nine German songs, accusing OpenAI of reproducing protected lyrics without buying licences or paying the creators. The court found that "both the memorization in the language models and the reproduction of the song lyrics" in ChatGPT's answers were infringements, and that the writers were entitled to compensation.

OpenAI had argued that its models do not store or copy specific data, but reflect in their settings what they have learned, and that users, not the company, were responsible for what the chatbot produced. After the ruling it said it disagreed and was considering its next steps, and that the decision covered a limited set of lyrics.

GEMA said it was the first major case of its kind in Europe. Kai Welp, the head of its legal department, said it was crucial for authors to be paid for the commercial use of their works so that they could make a living, and hoped the decision would make AI companies more willing to negotiate. Raue, the law firm that represented GEMA, said the ruling was likely to have an impact far beyond Germany.

A children's dragon in court

Another German case is closer to Scheffler's own. OpenAI is being sued by the German publishing group Penguin Random House together with the author and illustrator Ingo Siegner, who allege that the company copied the children's book character Coconut the Little Dragon, known in Germany as Der kleine Drache Kokosnuss, the BBC reported.

The Munich Regional Court is due to decide in spring 2027 whether copyright law has been broken. Carina Mathern, the children's and young adult publisher on the management board of the Penguin Random House publishing group, said the lawsuit aimed to help ensure that copyright stays effectively protected in the age of artificial intelligence and that creative professionals get fair conditions.

An OpenAI spokesperson told the BBC the company was having "productive conversations with rightsholders around the world" about supporting creativity, including fan art, while protecting intellectual property and acting on copyright complaints. The company said its models were trained on a variety of sources and that copyright holders could raise disputes with it directly.

The worries of younger artists

Scheffler is an established illustrator whose Gruffalo books have sold more than 18 million copies worldwide, but he said the issue went far beyond his own work. Other artists fear for their livelihoods too.

Ivy Deng, a master's student in painting at the Royal College of Art, told the BBC she did not feel protected by the rules on fair use of her art. She said she had faith that people who support art understand the difference between work developed by hand over time and something replicated in a moment.

Prof James Coupe, the head of the college's artificial intelligence programme, welcomed Scheffler's contribution. He said the debate was too often framed as a choice between embracing and rejecting AI, which missed the more important question of who gets to shape the technology and whose interests it serves.

The deep dark wood

The Gruffalo, written by the London-born author Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Scheffler, was first published in 1999. It tells the story of a mouse who outsmarts the predators of the deep dark wood, and finally the Gruffalo himself, with a tale about a terrifying creature he believes he has made up.

Donaldson has said the story grew from a Chinese folk tale about a child who tricks a tiger, and that she changed the beast because she could not find a rhyme for "tiger", Lucy Knight reported for The Guardian. The book has been translated into more than 100 languages and dialects and adapted into stage plays, an Oscar-nominated animated film, a ride at Chessington World of Adventures and a series of woodland trails.

The pair's first book together was A Squash and a Squeeze in 1993, and they have since published more than 30 picture books, among them Room on the Broom and Monkey Puzzle. Several have been adapted for the stage and for television.

One last Gruffalo

Scheffler's warning comes weeks after the publication of Gruffalo Granny in September, the third and, Donaldson says, final Gruffalo book, following The Gruffalo's Child in 2004. In it the Gruffalo and his daughter await a visit from Granny Gruffalo, with the mouse, owl, fox and snake back at the centre of the story, Joanna Moorhead reported for The Guardian.

Scheffler had long said there would be no return to the deep dark wood. When the book was announced in 2025 he said Donaldson had sent him a "wonderfully clever and inspired new text" out of the blue. "Could I decline? Of course not!" he said.

Donaldson told Moorhead the new book was a celebration of storytelling, borrowing the idea of Shahrazad from The Arabian Nights, who saves her life by never finishing her stories, and weaving in her own earlier books so that Scheffler could reuse pictures he had already drawn.

More than 18.2 million copies of The Gruffalo and its first sequel have now been sold worldwide, and in 2025 Donaldson was named the UK's bestselling author across all genres since records began, The Guardian reported. She was made a dame in June.

The publisher Macmillan said it would work with the National Literacy Trust and other charities around the world on a reading and storytelling campaign alongside the new book, Knight reported. The trust had found at the end of 2024 that only one in three children enjoyed reading in their spare time, the lowest level since 2005. Its chief executive, Jonathan Douglas, said there was no better way to spark a love of stories than the Gruffalo.

Performing has always been part of the books' life. Donaldson and her late husband, Malcolm, took part in theatre shows and recording sessions, singing songs about the Gruffalo and her other stories, with family members joining in, among them her great-niece, the singer Lola Young, Moorhead wrote. Donaldson, who grew up in a musical family, said writing was private and creative, while performing and signings let her meet people. "The variety is what I like," she said.

She is not slowing down. Donaldson told The Guardian that her next book, Winifred Duck, based on the true story of a cargo of bath toys that fell off a ship and drifted around the world, is due early next year, and that several others, including Baby Grandpa, are in the pipeline.

It is that success, and the instantly recognisable look of Scheffler's characters, that makes the Gruffalo such a clear test of how far copyright reaches when a machine can produce a convincing copy of a much-loved character in seconds.