‘The feature was not a good feature’ — Grammarly CEO admits Experts Review didn’t work, but you may not like what replaces it

He's not saying the class-action lawsuit has any merit

24 Mar 2026 · TechRadar

Opinion By Lance Ulanoff published 24 March 2026

(Image credit: Getty Images)

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It's pretty obvious where Grammarly went wrong, isn't it? Blame AI. Grammarly's parent company, Superhuman, has been in hot water and facing a class action lawsuit over its use of real experts' names (and their perceived way of writing, editing, and thinking) in its now-discontinued Expert Review feature. The feature relied on AI to guess at how an expert like Tom's Guide's Mark Spoonauer might guide you in your writing.

The good news is that even Superhuman's CEO, Shishir Mehrotra, agrees that the feature was essentially terrible. Speaking with The Verge's Nilay Patel on the Decoder Podcast, Mehrotra admitted, "The feature was not a good feature. It wasn’t good for experts, it wasn’t good for users."

Mehrotra explained that he hadn't actually spent time with the Expert Review prior to the controversy, even though it launched in August 2025. Months later, investigative reporter Julia Angwin wrote in The New York Times why she was suing Grammarly after learning that she and other journalists and experts were being "turned into AI editors against their will."Angwin's class-action lawsuit appears to have triggered the removal of the Expert Review feature from Grammarly.

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Mehrotra, however, insisted that the feature was removed long before the lawsuit. In fact, while the Superhuman CEO repeatedly said they missed the mark with Expert Review, he also claimed the lawsuit is "without merit."

Not getting paid

When Patel repeatedly pressed Mehrotra on how much he planned to pay Patel for the use of his, well, not exactly likeness, but persona, Mehrotra made it clear he does not believe Superhuman owes these experts anything for using their names and how they think (based on what the LLMs could glean from the Internet). Instead, he repeatedly turned to the idea that Grammarly (Superhuman) was more like YouTube.

"I think our main goal is to build a platform a lot like YouTube. You should choose to be on our platform. You should be able to choose and build an experience you trust. You should choose your business model. When you choose your business model, you should get paid for your contributions to it. That’s the model we’re working on. That’s really where I want to be."

So on the one hand, Mehrotra conceded that Expert Review was flawed and maybe poorly executed (despite the fact that it existed for months but was buried so deeply that many didn't notice). On the other hand, Superhuman (and Grammarly) will continue to lean heavily on AI to help experts build monetizable personas that users can tap into for expert guidance.

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