A second AI meeting notetaker is now facing a federal privacy lawsuit built on the same theory that kept the Otter.ai case alive this month, and this time the complaint argues the silence was the product’s selling point, not an accident.

Tarra Chamberlain filed a proposed class action against Granola, Inc. and Granola Labs Ltd. on July 30, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The complaint alleges Granola’s AI notetaker records and transcribes meetings without most participants’ knowledge, feeding the recordings into the company’s own model training by default. Unlike bot-based notetakers that visibly join a call, Granola runs invisibly on the host’s device; the complaint cites the company’s own website copy stating other participants “won’t know it’s there” as evidence the lack of notice was a deliberate design choice rather than an oversight. The suit brings claims under the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, California’s Invasion of Privacy Act, and common-law privacy theories.

The case lands three weeks after HRTech reported on the Otter.ai privacy litigation surviving a motion to dismiss on an “eavesdropper” theory under California law. Together, the two suits mean HR teams evaluating any AI meeting assistant, for interviews, performance conversations, or internal meetings, are now looking at active federal litigation against two separate vendors in the same product category, not a single isolated case that might be dismissed as an outlier.

“The AI transcription and recording issue is a hot issue,” said Bradford Kelley, a shareholder at Littler Mendelson, adding that HR teams should be “very interested in this case.” The original insight for HR buyers is procedural: a generic “this meeting may be recorded” disclaimer does not address a tool that never announces itself at all, and roughly a dozen states require all-party consent regardless of a vendor’s default settings. HRTech’s recent opinion coverage argued courts are setting the real rules for HR AI while federal oversight retreats; these two suits are the clearest evidence yet of that pattern in a product category most HR departments already use daily.

Source: U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (via CourtListener)