What happened when Grammarly decided to blatantly steal from EVERY WRITER ON THE PLANET!? (For once, perhaps, a happy ending)

I have a very long list of amazing words to write today. Ones I get paid to write. Money that feeds my kids , pays their medical bills, and puts them through school. Words I've agreed to write, using my own name. And my own brand. A brand that I've spend a career building, often working punishing hours, sometimes for pennies an hour amortized over time, while being the target of sexist trolls, gossip bloggers, and billionaires threatening me. All to build the value the brand I have today where my words put food on my kids' table as a single mom.

But I have to quickly write something first to address these amoral clowns who stole my brand, identity, and decades and decades of sweat equity to fraudulently sell "my words" to other people using my name without permission.

Tl;dr: Grammarly thought it'd be a great idea to steal lots of writers names and identities -- not "just" our work-- as if we are writing coaches for their paid service. The scope of the breathtaking theft and grift was substantial.

Not just late geniuses (and women of color) like Bell Hooks, but a whole host of swaggeringly badass investigative journalists like John Carryrou, Casey Newton , Kara Swisher , me, and our new hero Julia Angwin.

No compensation, no permission. And it wasn't even like, "in the style of Sarah Lacy." (Nor was it even well done or remotely even in the style of Sarah Lacy! They aren't even good at it!)

But this post is less about these clowns. That's been well covered. It's more to celebrate Julia Angwin and the class action that has been filed to bring Grammerly to justice.

This follows the great thriller writer (and friend of mine!) Andi Bartz bringing Anthropic to a multi billion dollar settlement for stealing writers' work.

When streaming broke the rights of musicians, the music industry ultimately just had to get over it and accept new models of being paid. I am so proud to be part of an industry that has mostly said: F- that. We will see you in court.

People in the comments on my LI post about it earlier this week (which went semi-viral) and Julia's post about her suit keep saying things to the effect of: Here's why we need humans involved in AI!

Friends: I'm pretty sure the humans were the problem.

It's clear that someone at Grammarly-- a human, many, many humans who never raised an objection; investors presumably; lawyers presumably-- thought this was OK.

An industry of thousands of humans were also the ones who thought that AI stealing ALL OF OUR WRITING was OK.

The humans have been doing this is Silicon Valley since the "disruption" era began. There was a trial balloon of this floated in the ride sharing era and everyone of us who got in those cars and kept clicking on that "baller" black Uber logo as they kept not doing background checks and women kept getting raped, because it was more convenient than switching to a pink logo or taking the bus or getting a cab . . . well, that's "why" people thought they'd get away with it.

We've all been letting them get away with it for a few decades. And paying them handsomely for it. In the billions.

It was just extra that Grammarly thought: "I know. . . let's take the journalists who have actually had sleepless nights, physical threats, legal threats. . . all the sh*t that comes with covering and exposing the kind of bad behavior we are about to do and also steal their brands, rip them off and directly profit of off all of THAT WORK!"

And them presumably twirled their mustaches and closed the War Room meeting of the Bad Place with the theme song, 1-877-Kars-4-Kids.

When we interviewed Andi at our Palm Springs Readers Festival last month about the Anthropic settlement (tickets on sale for next year if you want to hear convos like this smashed up with a lot of novels in Palm Springs in the perfect time of year IRL . . .) she noted that Anthropic wasn't even the most evil. Conversations that came out in discovery were like, "Whoa . . . hold on guys. . . should we be doing this?"

There was at least some discussion of: Hold up-- Is this evil? Are we the baddies?

1) I doubt that's happened at most AI companies that have and continue to steal from us.

2) It shows the issue is the humans. I have no doubt discovery in this case will prove the same. And can't wait to read it.

And here is the other uncomfortable truth, y'all. It's not just the humans at the companies: It's the humans using them.

Remember what I said about Uber customers? Lawbreaking kept metastasizing as they were rewarded. Women kept getting sexually assaulted. The New York Times continues to report how widespread it's been as people keep pushing that stupid black icon on their phones over and over again. (Thirteen years after we reported this at Pando, and my family was threatened as a result. Just the kind of reporting fake stolen Grammerly "Sarah Lacy" could have coached you to write your . . . college essay about days ago. . . )

Lest you think the cultures of an Uber breaking laws and the culture of AI theft and back actions aren't connected: The very guy who detailed a multi-million plan and four person headcount to destroy my life in a way that wouldn't be tracked back to Uber-- Emil Michael-- is the same Emil Michael who just last week tried to force Anthropic to bend the Trump Administration's knees in ways so morally unpalatable, Anthropic refused.

Again: It's the people. It's not the AI. It's the people are running the AI. In the case of Anthropic and this demand, the people said no.

And -- again-- if you are still using Grammarly now, you are also the people.

When I told my kids about this yesterday, I said, "So this company Grammarly--"

And they interrupted and said, "Oh that terrible company that everyone uses to plagiarize essays?"

Middle schoolers. That's the brand.

And here's a more uncomfortable truth: Are you using any AI engine to do your writing? You are using our stolen work.

I had a conversation with a client about this this past week: If you run your work through AI engines to "rewrite it" it might not be as clumsy as Grammarly saying Kara Swisher or Andi Bartz "coached" you, but if you get a clever turn of phrase that makes you smile; that you think "Hot d*mn! This thing is good!" It probably isn't.

It was probably stolen from the billions and billions of words that AI engines stole from all of us. You are quite likely plagiarizing from something one of us came up with and probably weren't paid enough to write.

There are many uses for AI. But when you use AI to write-- to express "your" thoughts-- please stop fooling yourself. You are stealing our thoughts to do it. Or rather, they've stolen our thoughts. But you are the fence. And you know it. We all know it. Write your own words. Or this keeps happening.

Stop asking why this keeps happening. This is why it keeps happening. The market keeps rewarding it.

Ok I have to get back to work that the real Sarah Lacy does to real get paid for it, but a few last thoughts:

1. This is hugely courageous by Julia and whoever else is leading the class action suit. You have no idea how much work it is and how much sh*t is about to come their way.

Andi and Paul talked a good bit about this in our fireside chat at the Readers' Festival. Part of the reason that she did it was that she didn't have kids, "doesn't sext with people" and didn't have a lot to hide or a lot of ways people could come after her. She went in with her eyes open.

And that was extraordinarily smart. Because if 30 years in Silicon Valley has taught me anything, it's that the playbook is getting nastier, not nicer. Just writing Emil's name three times here has probably Beatlejuice-summoned another IRS audit or black vans outside my house or some other bullshit that terrorized me, Susan Fowler, and any of Uber's enemies for years and should be illegal.

Everyone should continue to have Julia's back as this rolls on. Send her gift baskets. Flowers. If she is in line behind you at Starbucks, buy her coffee. Pay her parking meter. Randomly message her that she is a hero. When -- inevitably-- you see the comments that start "just saying . . ." know that a paid operative is trying to discredit her.

For two days my kids have been like, "MOM! Are you going to sue Grammarly?" I think they hate that they only hear the stories of the Robin Hood Sarah Lacy days when they were babies and don't get to live them. (And by "Robin Hood" I mean the British Fox who stole from the rich, not the scammy finance app. Jeez, Silicon Valley DOES ruin everything!)

And I was like, "Between raising teenagers, expanding a chain of independent bookstores and co-writing about six books. . . NO." While that's reasonable it also is lame, because I tell them every three days my words bought our house, and no one should ever let them talk them out of the power and value of their words. So shouldn't I fight to reclaim the value of my d*mn words!?

Well, Julia and anyone else leading this thing is on behalf of all of us and that makes them huge, huge heroes. They are doing something the rest of us desperately wanted someone to take on but didn't have the bandwidth, stomach, or courage for. In a world where we move on way too fast, we should never stop talking about it.

2. Writers need to keep doing this. As all writers know: Rules of three. Anthropic. Grammarly. Who's next? Grammarly has shown AI companies will keep escalating the intellectual property theft if we don't. Andi Bartz showed we will win. Money is the only language Silicon Valley will understand, because it's all we got. My lovely speech above aside, people will keep fencing our words and rewarding these companies. If people used Uber despite sexual assault; people will keep using our stolen words to rewrite their social media posts. Stealing writers words is a lot less grizzly of a thing to be complicit in.

3. The potential for damages is huge in this one. No part of me is a lawyer nor has ever been in a legal classroom. However, Pando had more than $400m of baseless threatened lawsuits, so I've paid a lot of billable hours to lawyers while my company was on the line. One thing Paul noted when we talked about this is the potential for damages.

In misrepresenting "Sarah Lacy" editing something and getting paid for that, Grammarly was stealing work from me, because I get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to coach people writing books. In saying "Kara Swisher" would have written it this way, you are stealing whatever Kara would be paid as a keynote or a freelancer. Consider six figure book deals of some of these names. In picking big names, they screwed themselves on several levels. One of which may be a whole 'nother level of zeros in a potential settlement.

4. Their defenses have been terrible. The idea you could opt out? Bell Hooks can opt out? The rest of us only found out about it when we read about it in the news this week. And then the apology was basically like "Oh we thought you'd like the exposure!" If this is what you said publicly, the disclosure is going to be damning. I'd get out the checkbook now. The more that comes out, I have a feeling, the worse it will look.

5. Woo hoo! Tech reporting!! This is a great triumph for tech reporting!!! Everyone acts like it's dead. But it did this! Even fragmented across Substacks. I read about it from Casey Newton and I believe others wrote about it as well. We can still take 'em down, y'all!

OK, back to work. Thank you industry for banding together. Thank you world for caring and amplifying these stories.