The class-action complaint filed in federal court accuses Grammarly’s parent company of using the names and professional reputations of real journalists and authors — including Stephen King and Neil deGrasse Tyson — to sell AI writing advice to millions of users without ever asking their permission.
The Grammarly AI lawsuit that broke into public view this week is not about AI training data or scraped articles. It is about something more direct: a company selling an AI product by attaching the names of real, identifiable people to it — and those people never agreed to participate.
Julia Angwin, the award-winning investigative journalist who founded The Markup, filed a class-action lawsuit Wednesday in the Southern District of New York against Superhuman Platform Inc., the parent company of Grammarly. The complaint accuses Superhuman of violating privacy and publicity rights by using the names and identities of hundreds of journalists, authors, writers, and editors for commercial purposes without their consent or compensation.
Wired first reported the lawsuit’s filing.
What Grammarly’s Expert Review Feature Actually Did
For months, Grammarly offered a feature called “Expert Review” as part of its $12-per-month Pro subscription. The tool presented AI-generated editing suggestions to users as if they came directly from recognized professionals and subject-matter experts. Users could select from a roster of real names — and receive writing feedback supposedly channeled through their voice and judgment.
The names associated with the feature read like a media industry roster: Stephen King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, Kara Swisher, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, The New York Times’ Kashmir Hill, The Atlantic’s Kaitlyn Tiffany, and several journalists at The Verge, including Monica Chin. None of them had agreed to be included. Most had no idea their names were being used until reporters and colleagues started testing the feature.
Grammarly did include a disclaimer in its documentation — “References to experts in Expert Review are for informational purposes only and do not indicate any affiliation with Grammarly or endorsement by those individuals or entities” — but critics said the language was buried and inaccessible to most users. The overall presentation of the feature implied direct expert involvement, not a distant, small-print disclaimer.
Casey Newton, the tech journalist behind the Platformer newsletter, was one of the first to publicly call it out after The Verge’s original exposé surfaced the feature. “Grammarly just had the bad manners to put my name on it,” Newton wrote. Angwin said she only found out her identity was being used after Newton alerted her through his reporting.
The absurdity of the feature’s mechanics became apparent quickly. Author Benjamin Dreyer reportedly copy-pasted paragraphs of lorem ipsum — placeholder nonsense text — and the tool returned writing tips attributed to Stephen King.
The Lawsuit: Right of Publicity, Not Copyright
Angwin filed the complaint on behalf of herself and others similarly situated. The suit does not name a specific damages figure for individuals but states that total damages across the plaintiff class exceed $5 million. It targets Superhuman under laws that prohibit using someone’s identity for commercial purposes without their permission — specifically New York’s right of publicity statute.
This is a meaningful legal distinction. The complaint is not a copyright case about AI scraping articles or training datasets. It is an identity case. Grammarly was not just drawing on Angwin’s published work — it was trading on her name, her professional credibility, and the perception that she was endorsing or participating in a paid product. That is what right of publicity law is designed to prevent.
“I have worked for decades honing my skills as a writer and editor, and I am distressed to discover that a tech company is selling an imposter version of my hard-earned expertise,” Angwin said in a statement.
Peter Romer-Friedman, Angwin’s attorney, called the legal issues straightforward. “The broader implications are far-reaching,” he added.
Grammarly Shuts the Feature Down — and Apologizes
The backlash was swift enough that Grammarly disabled the Expert Review feature on March 11, 2026, the same day Angwin filed her lawsuit. Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra issued a public apology. “I want to apologize and acknowledge that we’ll rethink our approach going forward,” Mehrotra said, adding that the company intends to reimagine the feature in a way that gives experts more control over how they are represented.
Disabling the feature does not extinguish the lawsuit. The legal complaint alleges the damage — the commercial exploitation of real people’s identities for months, across a product sold to over 30 million daily users and more than 500,000 organizations — has already occurred.
Kara Swisher, one of the journalists named in the feature, criticized Grammarly for what she described as monetizing real identities without involvement. Swisher and others framed it as a straightforward consent problem: the tool was not just inspired by real experts in the abstract — it presented itself as speaking for them.
What This Means for the AI Industry
The Grammarly AI lawsuit arrives at a moment when the entire AI sector is navigating the question of how far companies can go in appropriating human identity to sell products. OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have all experimented with ways to attach authority and expertise to AI-generated outputs. Grammarly’s Expert Review feature was a particularly explicit version of that pattern — real names, real professional reputations, attached to machine-generated suggestions, sold as a premium subscription benefit.
If Angwin prevails, the precedent would extend well beyond Grammarly. Any AI company using identified real people to signal the quality or authority of their product — without those people’s consent — could face similar liability under right of publicity laws, which vary by state but tend to be strongest in California and New York.
The lawsuit also raises a pointed question about the enterprise market. Grammarly’s corporate clients paid for a product described as offering expert-level writing assistance. If that expertise was fabricated through the unauthorized use of real journalists’ and authors’ identities, those customers may need to reassess what they were actually buying.
FAQ
Q1: What is the Grammarly AI lawsuit actually about? The Grammarly AI lawsuit is a class-action complaint filed by journalist Julia Angwin in federal court in New York. It accuses Grammarly’s parent company, Superhuman Platform Inc., of using the names and professional identities of hundreds of journalists, authors, and editors to sell AI-generated writing advice through its Expert Review feature — without their consent, involvement, or compensation. The lawsuit is based on right of publicity and privacy laws, not copyright.
Q2: Who is Julia Angwin and why did she file the suit? Julia Angwin is an award-winning investigative journalist and the founder of The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom that covers the societal impact of technology. She is the only named plaintiff in the class-action complaint. Angwin said she discovered her name was being used in Grammarly’s Expert Review feature through Casey Newton’s newsletter Platformer, and described the experience as finding “a tech company is selling an imposter version of my hard-earned expertise.”
Q3: What was the Expert Review feature and who else was named in it? Expert Review was a feature available to Grammarly Pro subscribers at $12 per month. It offered AI-generated writing feedback presented as advice from real professionals. Named individuals included Stephen King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, Kara Swisher, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, The New York Times’ Kashmir Hill, The Atlantic’s Kaitlyn Tiffany, and several Verge journalists. None had agreed to participate or been informed their names were being used.
Q4: How did Grammarly respond to the Grammarly AI lawsuit and the backlash? Grammarly disabled the Expert Review feature on March 11, 2026 — the same day Angwin filed her lawsuit. Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra issued a public apology, saying he would rethink the approach and give experts more control over their representation going forward. The company had previously defended the feature as providing suggestions “inspired by” leading professionals, and had included a disclaimer in its documentation stating the experts had no affiliation with or endorsement of Grammarly.
Q5: Could the Grammarly AI lawsuit affect other AI companies? Yes, potentially. The legal theory behind the case — that companies cannot commercially exploit a real person’s identity without consent under right of publicity laws — could apply broadly across the AI industry. As AI companies increasingly attach real human names, credentials, and reputations to their products to signal authority or quality, the Angwin case could establish that doing so without permission carries legal consequences, particularly in states like New York and California with strong publicity rights protections.
Sources & References
- Wired — Grammarly Faces Class Action Lawsuit Over Expert Review AI Feature
- The Verge — Grammarly’s Expert Review: Original Exposé
- SiliconANGLE — Grammarly Shuts Down Expert Review After Pushback From the Real Experts
- FlowingData — Class Action Lawsuit for Grammarly
- Platformer / Casey Newton — On Being Named in Grammarly’s Feature Without Consent
