How It Started

Julia Angwin is not the kind of person who disappears easily. A Pulitzer Prize finalist. Former Wall Street Journal investigative reporter. Founder of two nonprofit newsrooms dedicated to holding technology companies accountable. Author of a New York Times bestseller on surveillance capitalism. When your career is built on exposing corporate malfeasance, you assume the corporations at least know you exist.

On March 9, 2026, Angwin discovered that Grammarly had been using her name for seven months to sell a subscription product she had never heard of. She didn’t learn this from Grammarly. She learned it from another journalist, Casey Newton, who published an article titled “Grammarly turned me into an AI editor against my will and I hate it.”

Newton had discovered that he, Angwin, and hundreds of other writers had been involuntarily conscripted into serving as unpaid experts for a for-profit AI tool called Expert Review. The feature launched in August 2025. For $12 a month, Grammarly users could upload their writing and receive real-time feedback purportedly from acclaimed journalists like Angwin, famous authors like Stephen King, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill, journalist Kara Swisher, and Julie Brill, the former Chief Privacy Officer of Microsoft.

The interface told users that Grammarly was “reading your text” and “finding experts to review your piece.” Then it announced: “Applying ideas from Julia Angwin.” Next to specific portions of the user’s text, the tool displayed Angwin’s name alongside suggestions like “Lead with personal stake,” “Sharpen the opening,” “Simplify technical tracker description,” and “Clarify the ‘so what’ after each finding.”

If the user clicked on the comment, a more detailed suggestion appeared with the disclaimer that the feedback was “inspired” by the named expert. Users could then insert example text reflecting what the expert supposedly recommended.

“I was shocked and horrified that Grammarly had been appropriating my name and identity to provide comments and feedback to Grammarly’s users for profit without my consent, consultation, or input.”

Angwin filed a class action complaint two days later. Case No. 26 Civ. 02005, United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The Non-Financial Ledger

This is a story about theft, but not the kind prosecutors recognize. No one broke into Angwin’s home. No one hacked her bank account. What Superhuman Platform, Inc. took was something harder to quantify and impossible to recover: control over her professional identity.

Angwin has spent 25 years building a reputation. Wall Street Journal. ProPublica. The Markup. Proof News. A body of work focused on privacy, surveillance, and corporate accountability. That reputation is not an abstract asset. It is the reason editors assign her stories. The reason readers trust her analysis. The reason sources agree to speak with her. It is the foundation of her livelihood.

Grammarly did not steal her words. It stole her credibility. It told users that they were receiving writing advice from Julia Angwin when they were receiving algorithmically generated suggestions derived from analyzing her published work. The tool analyzed her writing style, drew conclusions about her editorial preferences, and attributed advice to her that she never gave and may not endorse.

The harm is insidious. If a Grammarly user follows the “advice” attributed to Angwin and receives a bad grade in school or a negative performance evaluation at work, that user may conclude that Julia Angwin’s editorial judgment is flawed. Angwin had no knowledge of the advice, no input into its formulation, and no control over its dissemination. Yet her name is attached to the outcome.

The complaint describes Angwin as “dismayed to see a commercial enterprise using her name and identity for profit without her consent and causing Grammarly’s users to think that Ms. Angwin was giving them feedback and comments in which she had no role.”

Multiply this harm by hundreds of professionals. The class action complaint names Stephen King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Kashmir Hill, Kara Swisher, and Julie Brill as additional “experts” whose identities were appropriated. The lawsuit seeks relief on behalf of all persons in the United States who had their names used in Expert Review without consent.

This is not a privacy violation in the traditional sense. It is something darker: the commercial colonization of professional identity. Superhuman Platform built a product that required the participation of experts, then simply took that participation without asking.

Legal Receipts

“In 2025, Grammarly launched a tool called Expert Review that enabled Grammarly users to receive feedback on their writing from well-known journalists like Ms. Angwin, and even famous authors like Stephen King. For $12 a month, Grammarly users could upload their writing and receive real-time comments on how to improve their prose from Ms. Angwin, Mr. King, and other acclaimed writers. While Grammarly used this new feature to sell more subscriptions and Grammarly’s users got helpful feedback from acclaimed writers, there was one big problem: Grammarly did not ask the expert writers for the right to use their names or to offer feedback on their behalf.”
— Class Action Complaint, Julia Angwin v. Superhuman Platform, Inc., Case No. 26 Civ. 02005, ¶ 2

“Contrary to the apparent belief of some tech companies, it is unlawful to appropriate peoples’ names and identities for commercial purposes, whether those people are famous or not.”
— Complaint, ¶ 3

“Upon information and belief, Grammarly structured the Expert Review tool so that its customers would believe that the ‘experts’ like Ms. Angwin were providing their perspective, insight, feedback, and comments on the users’ writing or, at a minimum, that the experts were associated with feedback and comments being provided.”
— Complaint, ¶ 20

“Grammarly is not only using these experts’ names, but is also using their publicly-available work to craft writing advice that these experts did not give. Grammarly is analyzing Ms. Angwin’s work and, based on that work, is drawing conclusions about what advice she would give to Grammarly’s users. But in many cases Ms. Angwin may not agree with that advice.”
— Complaint, ¶ 22

“Before Superhuman used the name and identity of Ms. Angwin and other ‘experts’ as part of Grammarly’s Expert Review tool to advance Superhuman’s commercial purposes, Superhuman was required by California and New York law to obtain the consent of Ms. Angwin and the other ‘experts.’ But Superhuman failed to even request their consent, let alone obtain it.”
— Complaint, ¶ 30

“The protection of name and likeness from unwarranted intrusion or exploitation is the heart of the law of privacy.”
— Lugosi v. Universal Pictures, 25 Cal. 3d 813, 824 (Cal. 1979), cited in Complaint ¶ 27

“A person, firm or corporation that uses for advertising purposes, or for the purposes of trade, the name, portrait, picture, likeness, or voice of any living person without having first obtained the written consent of such person, or if a minor of such minor’s parent or guardian, is guilty of a misdemeanor.”
— New York Civil Rights Law § 50, cited in Complaint ¶ 28

Societal Impact Mapping

Economic Inequality

Superhuman Platform claims Grammarly earns $700 million per year. In 2025, the company raised $1 billion in financing to expand its offerings. The Expert Review tool was part of a paid subscription tier priced at $12 per month. Upon information and belief, the complaint alleges Superhuman earned millions of dollars in revenue selling subscriptions that included Expert Review.

The journalists, authors, and editors whose names were appropriated received zero compensation. Not a royalty structure. Not a consulting fee. Not even a courtesy notification. The value extraction was total. Superhuman captured 100% of the revenue generated by monetizing the reputations of people who built those reputations over decades of work.

This is wealth transfer by algorithmic proxy. The AI tool does not create value. It extracts value from the accumulated credibility of professionals whose labor Grammarly did not compensate. The subscription model ensures recurring revenue. The class action structure suggests hundreds of victims. The math is simple: millions of dollars in profit built on stolen identity.

Public Health

The public health harm is epistemic. When users believe they are receiving editorial advice from Julia Angwin, they are operating under a false premise. The feedback is not from Angwin. It is from an algorithm trained on Angwin’s published work. The algorithm cannot account for context, nuance, or the specific circumstances in which Angwin might deploy a particular writing technique.

This creates a pollution of the information environment. Users make decisions based on attributions that are false. If they act on that advice and experience negative outcomes, they may lose trust in the named expert. The expert, meanwhile, has no mechanism to correct the record because the expert was never part of the process.

Scale this across hundreds of experts and millions of users. The result is a systematic degradation of the relationship between credibility and consent. Grammarly has introduced a tool that severs the connection between a professional’s reputation and their ability to control how that reputation is deployed.

Environmental Degradation

Not applicable to this case. No environmental keywords present in source material.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

What Now?

The lawsuit names Superhuman Platform, Inc. as the defendant. The company is incorporated and headquartered in San Francisco, California. It owns and operates Grammarly, an AI-powered writing assistant used by 40 million people daily. The company maintains an office in New York City.

The case is assigned to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Case No. 26 Civ. 02005. Filed March 11, 2026. Counsel for Plaintiff: Peter Romer-Friedman, Peter Romer-Friedman Law PLLC.

Watchlist of Regulatory Bodies:

• Federal Trade Commission (FTC): Authority over deceptive trade practices and false advertising.
• California Attorney General’s Office: Enforcement authority under California Civil Code § 3344 and common law right of publicity.
• New York Attorney General’s Office: Enforcement authority under New York Civil Rights Law §§ 50 and 51.
• U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC): Oversight of Superhuman Platform’s financing disclosures following the $1 billion raise in 2025.

Direct Action Recommendations:

• If you are a journalist, author, editor, or lawyer whose name may have been used in Grammarly’s Expert Review tool, contact Peter Romer-Friedman Law PLLC to inquire about joining the class action. Contact information is available in the public court filing.
• If you subscribe to Grammarly and have used the Expert Review feature, consider whether you were misled about the nature of the “expert” feedback you received. Document your subscription records.
• Support nonprofit journalism organizations that investigate corporate misuse of AI. Julia Angwin founded Proof News and The Markup specifically to hold technology companies accountable. These organizations operate on donations, not venture capital.
• Advocate for federal right-of-publicity legislation. California and New York have robust protections, but many states do not. The absence of a federal standard allows companies to exploit legal gaps.
• Demand transparency in AI training data. If a tool claims to offer advice “inspired by” a specific person, that person should have consented to the use of their work and identity. No consent means no product.

The best resistance is collective. This lawsuit exists because one journalist read another journalist’s article and recognized her own exploitation. The class action structure exists because the harm was not individual. It was systematic. If you have been harmed, you are not alone. If you have been silenced, the courts are still open. If you have been stolen from, the law still recognizes theft.