Investigative journalist Julia Angwin is suing Grammarly in a class action lawsuit, claiming the writing tool violated her privacy and publicity rights by using her work - and the work of other authors - to build AI editing features without permission.
Angwin, best known for founding The Markup and her reporting on algorithmic accountability, alleges that Grammarly effectively turned professional writers into unpaid "AI editors." The core complaint: when writers used Grammarly to check their drafts, the company quietly fed that content into its AI systems. Every correction accepted, every sentence rewritten, every stylistic choice made by skilled authors became training data for Grammarly's generative AI features - features the company now sells as a premium product.
The timing matters. Grammarly has been aggressively pushing its AI writing assistant beyond simple grammar checks into full content generation, tone adjustment, and rewriting. That pivot from passive tool to active AI writer required massive amounts of high-quality writing data. According to the lawsuit, Grammarly found that data in its own users' documents.
This lawsuit follows a pattern we have seen building across the AI industry. Authors and creators are pushing back against companies that treat user-generated content as free training material. But this case is different from the broad copyright suits against OpenAI or Stability AI in one important way: Grammarly had a direct, trusted relationship with these writers. People gave Grammarly access to their drafts specifically to improve their writing, not to train a competing AI system.
That breach of trust argument could prove more legally potent than the copyright claims that have dominated AI litigation so far. Privacy and publicity rights vary by state, but they generally protect individuals from having their work or likeness used commercially without authorization - a lower bar to clear than proving copyright infringement.
Grammarly has not publicly responded to the lawsuit. The company has over 30 million daily active users, which means the potential class size is enormous. For anyone currently using Grammarly's free or premium tiers, it is worth reading the company's updated terms of service carefully - particularly any clauses about how your content is used to "improve" their products.