Superhuman CEO Apologizes for AI Cloning Journalists
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Superhuman (formerly Grammarly) is an AI productivity suite that owns Grammarly, Coda, and Mail, employing about 1,500 people and serving roughly 40 million daily active users who generate interactions across a million unique apps and agents per day.
- Expert Review, shipped in August by Grammarly, used AI-cloned "experts" — including The Verge reporters, Casey Newton, Julia Angwin, and scholar bell hooks — to deliver writing suggestions with no permission secured from any of them.
- Investigative journalist Julia Angwin filed a class action lawsuit over the unauthorized name use, and Superhuman responded first with an email-based opt-out and then by killing the feature entirely.
- Shishir Mehrotra apologized on the podcast, called the feature "not a good feature," and said the launch was greenlit by a small team — one product manager and a couple of engineers — without surfacing the permission question in the company's Dory-and-Pulse decision process.
- Superhuman Go, the company's newest product, opens the Grammarly platform to let anyone build AI agents that work across apps the same way Grammarly's writing assistant does, raising the same attribution questions the Expert Review episode exposed.
- Mehrotra previously served as YouTube's chief product officer and currently sits on Spotify's board of directors.
Why it matters: Superhuman killed Expert Review after reporters found their names had been AI-cloned without consent, but the company is now opening that same infrastructure to anyone via Superhuman Go. With 40 million daily users already running through Grammarly, the policies Mehrotra sets on attribution and creator consent — for both cloned voices and agent-built expertise — will define whether the platform repeats Expert Review's misstep at scale.
