Grammarly Lawsuit: AI Expert Review Class Action Claims and Status

The Grammarly lawsuit is a proposed class action filed in March 2026 by investigative journalist Julia Angwin against Superhuman Platform, Inc., the corporate parent of Grammarly, alleging that the company used the names and identities of hundreds of writers, journalists, and scientists to market an AI feature called “Expert Review” without their consent. The case, Angwin v. Superhuman Platform, Inc. (No. 1:26-cv-02005), is pending in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York before Judge John G. Koeltl.

What Expert Review Did

Grammarly launched Expert Review in August 2025 as part of a broader push into AI agents.¹ The tool sat inside Grammarly’s writing sidebar. When a user clicked it, the AI analyzed their draft and returned suggestions framed as feedback from a named writer or subject-matter expert, presenting the experience as if that person were personally editing the user’s work.²

The roster of “experts” was broad. It included tech journalists from The Verge, Wired, Bloomberg, The New York Times, and The Atlantic, novelists such as Stephen King, and scientists including Neil deGrasse Tyson and the late Carl Sagan.³ None had been asked. Alex Gay, Grammarly’s vice president of product and corporate marketing, told reporters the feature did not claim endorsement and offered suggestions “inspired by works of experts” whose “published works are publicly available and widely cited.”²

The tool also had accuracy problems. Some expert profiles carried outdated job titles. The source links attached to suggestions were often broken, pointed to spam, or led to content by someone else entirely.²

The Verge broke the story on March 6, 2026, reporting that several of its own staffers had been listed as experts without the publication being contacted.⁴ Backlash followed quickly. Tech journalist Casey Newton called the AI-generated advice attributed to him a “paid hallucination.”⁵ Kara Swisher called the company “rapacious information and identity thieves.”⁶ Angwin said she was “distressed to discover that a tech company is selling an imposter version of my hard-earned expertise.”

The company first offered an opt-out email address. On March 11, 2026, it disabled Expert Review entirely. Ailian Gan, Superhuman’s director of product management, said the company had “clearly missed the mark.”⁷ CEO Shishir Mehrotra posted an apology on LinkedIn acknowledging “valid critical feedback from experts who are concerned that the agent misrepresented their voices.”³

Who Filed the Lawsuit and Against Whom

Julia Angwin filed her complaint the same day the feature was pulled, March 11, 2026. She is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist known for reporting on algorithmic accountability at ProPublica and for founding the newsrooms The Markup and Proof News.⁸ She is represented by Peter Romer-Friedman Law PLLC.⁹

The defendant’s name causes some confusion. The writing tool is still called Grammarly, but the legal entity that owns it is now Superhuman Platform, Inc. Grammarly acquired the email client Superhuman in July 2025¹⁰ and rebranded the parent company under the Superhuman name in November 2025.¹¹

The Legal Claims

The complaint alleges that Superhuman’s use of writers’ names to market its $12-per-month subscription was a misappropriation of their commercial identities without consent or compensation.⁷ It brings four causes of action:

California common law right of publicity, for unauthorized use of identity for commercial advantage.
California Civil Code § 3344, the statutory counterpart covering the knowing use of a person’s name, likeness, or identity for advertising or selling services.
New York Civil Rights Law §§ 50 and 51, which prohibit using a living person’s name, likeness, or voice for advertising or trade purposes without written consent.
Unjust enrichment, on the theory that it would be inequitable for the company to keep subscription profits generated by exploiting the plaintiffs’ identities.

A central factual allegation is that Expert Review did not merely list names. The complaint states that Superhuman “falsely implied these experts were providing real-time, personalized feedback” and “attributed specific writing advice and comments to experts they never uttered or endorsed.”⁹

Who Is in the Proposed Class

The suit seeks certification of a nationwide class of all people in the United States whose names were used by Expert Review on any Superhuman platform, including Grammarly Enterprise, Grammarly Business, Grammarly for Education, Superhuman Go, and Grammarly’s AI writing surface, without their consent. A separate New York subclass is also proposed.⁹

Superhuman has not published a full list of the names used. Romer-Friedman has said obtaining that roster is his first priority in discovery, that more than 100 writers had already contacted the firm about joining, and that the total could reach the thousands.¹²

The feature also used the names of deceased individuals, including Carl Sagan and the historian David Abulafia, who died in January 2026.¹³ Whether estates can be part of the class is an open question. New York’s Civil Rights Law § 50-f provides certain post-mortem protections, and roughly 25 states, including California and New York, recognize some form of post-mortem publicity right.¹⁴

What the Suit Asks For

The plaintiffs ask for an injunction permanently barring Superhuman from using writers’ names without permission, along with actual, statutory, and exemplary damages, disgorgement of profits from Expert Review, and attorneys’ fees. The complaint pegs damages at more than $5 million, though plaintiff’s counsel has noted this figure is the minimum jurisdictional threshold for federal court and not a cap; the final number would depend on what the company earned from the feature.¹³¹⁵

Superhuman’s Response and Current Status

Despite Mehrotra’s public apology, the company’s litigation posture is combative. In an emailed statement he called the legal claims “without merit” and said Superhuman would “strongly defend against them.” He also asserted that the company had already begun taking the feature down for a redesign before the suit was filed and that during its “short lifespan” Expert Review “had very little usage.”³

On June 15, 2026, Superhuman filed motions to compel arbitration and to dismiss the complaint for failure to state a claim. The arbitration motion is strategically important. If the court finds Angwin bound by an arbitration clause, presumably from Grammarly’s terms of service, the case could be pulled out of federal court entirely. Angwin’s deadline to respond or amend was set for July 16, 2026, with an initial conference on July 29, 2026.¹⁶

How This Case Fits With Other AI Legal Fights

The Grammarly case is distinct from the wave of copyright lawsuits authors and publishers have brought against AI companies over training data. Those cases, including the Authors Guild’s suit against OpenAI, turn on whether ingesting copyrighted books to build language models is fair use. This one focuses on a later step: whether a company can attach real people’s names to AI output and sell it. The legal theory rests on decades of publicity-rights precedent that the complaint draws on directly.

The Authors Guild has publicly backed the suit, calling it an “important action” and framing it as part of a broader “pattern of exploitation” by AI companies. The Guild has renewed its call for a federal right-of-publicity law and urged Congress to strengthen the No Fakes Act.¹⁷¹⁸¹⁹

Whether the case survives Superhuman’s motion to dismiss and its bid to compel arbitration will be the first test of how existing publicity-rights law applies to AI tools that generate and attribute content to real people without their involvement.

1
Grammarly. Grammarly Launches AI Agents
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The Verge. Grammarly AI Expert Reviews
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The Guardian. Grammarly Removes AI Expert Review Feature Mimicking Writers After Backlash
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Nieman Lab. A Lot of Journalism Folks Are Offering Editing Advice as Grammarly’s AI Experts
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SiliconANGLE. Grammarly Shuts Expert Review After Pushback From Real Experts
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Platformer. Grammarly Expert Review Reviewed
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Wired. Grammarly Is Facing a Class Action Lawsuit Over Its AI Expert Review Feature
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Shorenstein Center. Independent Media Initiative With Julia Angwin
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ClassAction.org. Angwin v. Superhuman Platform Inc. Complaint
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TechCrunch. Grammarly Acquires AI Email Client Superhuman
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Grammarly. Announcing Company Rebrand to Superhuman
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Los Angeles Times. Grammarly Just Got Caught Putting Real Authors’ Names on AI-Generated Expert Writing Advice
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BBC. Grammarly Expert Review Lawsuit
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CompleteAITraining. Grammarly Pulls AI Feature That Mimicked Writers’ Voices
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Squarespace (PRF Law). Grammarly Complaint (Angwin v. Superhuman Platform, Inc.)
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CourtListener. Angwin v. Superhuman Platform Inc. Docket
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Authors Guild. Authors Sue Grammarly
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Congress.gov. S.1367 – NO FAKES Act of 2025
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Congress.gov. H.R. 2794 – NO FAKES Act of 2025