Substack is opening up to AI
CEO Chris Best reveals that MCP integration is coming soon. Also: His theory of AI slop, why YouTube is the real competition, and where independent media goes next.
Substack is building a MCP server. CEO Chris Best confirmed it when I asked him at the ACCESS live show at Notion HQ in San Francisco last week. He didn’t give a date, but the implication is broad: Substack is wiring itself so that AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT can read, write, and act directly on the platform on a creator’s behalf.
It’s a direction the rest of the industry is converging on. Substack rival Beehiiv just opened itself up to MCP, and a growing list of platforms are wiring themselves into LLMs this way so that an agent can interface with them. If writers want to use these AI tools, Best argued, Substack has to meet them there.
Chris joins this week’s episode of ACCESS, the podcast I co-host with Ellis Hamburger. You can watch the conversation above or listen to it in your podcast player of choice by clicking this link.
Plenty of Substack’s creators are openly hostile to AI. Best’s answer to them is a theory of slop. “Slop is not a thing that was made by AI,” he said. “It was a thing that was made without intention.” AI didn’t create the problem; it just massively scaled it, he argues. To Best, the tools are amplifiers, not shortcuts.“If we just never use the word AI, and you just see things that are genuine and human and great, that’s the answer.”
Best is also increasingly clear about who he’s actually competing with, and it isn’t other newsletter tools. He has called YouTube Substack’s main content competition, and on stage, he said the goal is to pay creators more than YouTube does. His longer-term pitch is that Substack becomes “the intellectual and cultural capital of the internet.”
A few more takeaways from the conversation:
The recent wave of Substack creator-exodus stories: It’s not an “en masse” trend. Best said Substack continues to grow steadily, but wouldn’t share specific metrics. He wouldn’t update the “more than 50 creators earning over $1 million a year” stat, but said it’s now “a lot more.”
AI for creators: His “dream” is a tool that auto-clips a podcast, posts it across networks, and translates it into every language.
Substack ads: They’re coming, but don’t expect a programmatic ad server.
Free speech: Ellis and I pressed him on whether Substack should demonetize content it finds distasteful; his answer was that readers, not Substack, decide who gets paid.
Listen or watch wherever you get podcasts.
Inside the ACCESS launch party
ICYMI
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