TL;DR

Journalist Julia Angwin has filed a class-action lawsuit against Grammarly, alleging the company used real people’s identities without permission for its AI-powered “Expert Review” editing feature. The company has since disabled the feature.

Grammarly’s Expert Review feature presented AI-generated writing suggestions as though they came from named real-world experts — journalists, academics and other public figures. The problem: none of them had agreed to participate.

Angwin discovered her identity was being used after Casey Newton, another journalist featured in the system, flagged it. The Verge’s own testing revealed several of its staff members, including editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, were also appearing as supposed experts behind Grammarly’s AI suggestions.

The class-action complaint alleges violations of privacy and publicity rights, specifically laws that prohibit using someone’s identity for commercial purposes without consent.

Rapid Reversal

The company initially responded by setting up an opt-out inbox where individuals could request removal. Within hours, it announced it was disabling the feature entirely. CEO Shishir Mehrotra acknowledged the company “fell short” and apologised, saying the team would “rethink our approach going forward.”

A Pattern Emerging

The case fits a growing trend of AI companies facing legal challenges over how they use people’s names, likenesses and work. From training data disputes to deepfake concerns, the line between using publicly available information and exploiting someone’s identity commercially is being tested in courts across the US and Europe.

For UK businesses building AI-powered features, the case is a reminder that branding AI outputs with real people’s names — even with good intentions — carries significant legal risk under both US publicity rights law and UK data protection rules.

Looking Forward

The lawsuit could set a precedent for how AI companies attribute or personalise their outputs. As AI tools increasingly mimic human expertise, the question of who gets credit — and who gets a say — is becoming a live regulatory and legal issue.

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