Grammarly pulls AI Expert Review feature that cloned editors' styles without their knowledge

Superhuman, the company that owns Grammarly, disabled its AI Expert Review feature in March 2026. The tool signed suggested text edits with the names of real journalists and editors without asking their consent. According to The Verge, those affected included the publication's editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and other Verge staff.

How Expert Review worked

Expert Review inserted comments in documents on behalf of Grammarly, stating that a suggested edit was "inspired" by the style of a specific well-known author. The Verge published a screenshot of a draft of its own article in Google Docs, where a Grammarly AI comment was signed with the name of Nilay Patel. The editor never consented to the use of his name and style in this feature. The screenshot served as direct evidence that the names of real journalists and editors were appearing in the product's interface without any negotiation with them. Grammarly asked neither Patel himself nor the other Verge staff whose names appeared in the service's suggestions.

• Superhuman, the owner of Grammarly, disabled the Expert Review feature
• The "experts" named without permission include The Verge's editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and other staff at the publication
• The announcement of the shutdown came from Ailian Gan, director of product management at Superhuman
• The decision followed an earlier report by The Verge exposing the practice of using other people's names in this Grammarly feature

What Superhuman said about its mistake

Superhuman acknowledged that it misjudged how users would react to the feature and promised to rebuild Expert Review from scratch, giving experts real control over how their names are used in the service, and whether they appear at all.

"After careful consideration, we have decided to disable

Expert Review while we reimagine the feature to make it more useful for users, while giving experts real control over how they are represented — or not represented at all," said Ailian Gan, director of product management at Superhuman, in a statement to The Verge.

"Based on the feedback we've received, we clearly missed the mark.

We're sorry, and we will act differently going forward," Gan added.

The feature was disabled only after The Verge first described how Expert Review worked and published the screenshot with Nilay Patel's name as evidence. Before The Verge's inquiry, Superhuman had neither disabled the feature nor commented on it publicly. Gan's statement was the company's first official response to the complaints.

What this means

Grammarly is a popular AI service for proofreading and editing text, used by journalists and editors at major publications, among others. The Expert Review episode shows how quickly a product built on data about real people, without their consent, can turn from a marketing move into a reputational risk. The company had to do more than apologize: it had to halt the feature entirely and rethink it from scratch. For other AI services that use people's names and styles for marketing, the message is clear: expert consent is now a requirement, not a formality.