AI Notetaker Lawsuits: Otter, Granola and Fireflies Tracker

The short answer: As of 27 October 2026 no AI notetaker has been found liable. Otter.ai is in discovery with its class-certification motion due 13 May 2027, Granola’s deadline to respond to the complaint ran to 12 October with no ruling reported, and Fireflies has a motion to dismiss pending in Illinois. All three cases ask the same question: does the vendor keep its own copy of the meeting and use it for its own purposes? A tool that processes on your device, such as Hedy on supported hardware, does not create that copy, but it does not remove your duty to get consent.

This page is a tracker. We update it when a court rules or a deadline moves, and the “latest developments” section below is dated. The “updated” date at the top shows when we last checked. For the legal theory behind the cases, read our analysis of the Otter.ai ruling and the Granola complaint.

Case status at a glance (as of 27 October 2026)

All of these are allegations at an early stage. None of the three companies has been found to have broken any law.

Latest developments (newest first)

• 30 September 2026: California’s governor signed SB 690, curbing private pen-register lawsuits over website tracking. It does not touch the wiretap claims in these cases (see below).
• 17 September 2026: Otter filed a 91-page answer to the consolidated complaint, denying the allegations and raising nine affirmative defenses.
• 16 September 2026: Judge Lee entered an amended scheduling order. Class-certification motion due 13 May 2027; last day to hear it 15 September 2027; trial-setting conference 1 December 2027. She wrote that the court is “not inclined to further extend these deadlines.”
• 20 August 2026: In the Otter case, the magistrate judge asked the parties to clarify one paragraph of their proposed protective order, which governs exchange of confidential material in discovery. In the Granola case, the parties stipulated to extend Granola, Inc.’s deadline to respond to the complaint to 12 October; Granola Labs Ltd. had not been served.
• 13 August 2026: Judge Lee granted Otter’s motion to dismiss in part and denied it in part.
• 30 July 2026: Chamberlain v. Granola, Inc. filed.

Otter.ai: discovery, with a 2027 class-certification date

On 13 August, Judge Lee let the federal wiretap claim, California Invasion of Privacy Act claims (section 631 for the three California plaintiffs, and section 632 for one of them), the Illinois biometric privacy claims, unjust enrichment, the Unfair Competition Law claim and a declaratory-judgment claim proceed. She dismissed the computer-fraud claims, the Washington Privacy Act claim and most common-law privacy claims, with leave to amend.

Otter’s September answer denies the complaint’s allegations, including that it creates and stores voiceprints. Those are denials, not findings, and they will be tested in discovery. There will be no class-certification ruling before late 2027, so anyone hoping the case would quietly go away should plan around it for at least another year.

Otter’s privacy policy, effective 16 June 2026, lists training its proprietary AI on de-identified audio recordings among its purposes. That default is why Otter.ai scores 2 on our training-transparency criterion.

Granola: no ruling on the merits yet

Chamberlain v. Granola, Inc. alleges that Granola’s silent, bot-free capture recorded a non-user without notice and that Granola trains on meeting content by default. The response deadline for Granola, Inc. was extended by stipulation to 12 October 2026. We could not retrieve docket entries filed after 20 August, and we found no report of a ruling or merits response, so we show the case as at the pleading stage.

Fireflies: Illinois voiceprint claims and a pending motion to dismiss

Fricker v. Fireflies.AI Corp. (N.D. Ill., Judge Seeger) alleges that Fireflies’ speaker recognition creates and keeps voiceprints of meeting participants, including people who never signed up, without the notice, written release and retention policy that Illinois’s BIPA requires. A related case, Martinez v. Fireflies.AI Corp., was reassigned to the same judge. A separate suit, Parrinello v. Fireflies.AI Corp., No. 3:26-cv-02479, is pending in the Northern District of California.

Fireflies has moved to dismiss. Earlier versions of this page reported a specific briefing schedule and a stay of discovery; we could not re-confirm those details against the public docket on 27 October, so we have removed them. We know of no ruling. We will update this page when the court decides the motion. Fireflies states it does not train on meeting content, so the Fireflies case is about biometrics and consent, not training.

Microsoft Teams bot blocking

Outside the courts, the most practical change is Microsoft’s. Message Center notice MC1459141, published 21 August 2026, adds a policy under Manage bots in Teams meeting policies that automatically blocks identified external meeting bots. As of Microsoft’s 9 September update, Targeted Release was mid-September and worldwide rollout was due to complete by late October 2026.

Three details matter:

• It is off by default. An admin has to turn it on and assign it to users or groups.
• It blocks only bots Teams can identify.
• It affects bot-based notetakers (the ones that join as a participant), not tools that capture audio on your own device.

Google Meet also labels unverified third-party notetaker bots as potential risks and can hold them for the host to admit, according to vendor help pages. Bot-based notetakers increasingly depend on each host’s settings. Our Microsoft Teams guide ranks the tools that work without a bot.

California’s SB 690 does not help notetakers

On 30 September 2026 Governor Newsom signed SB 690, which removes private lawsuits under CIPA’s pen-register and trap-and-trace section for website and app tracking, with an effective date of 1 January 2027 per law-firm summaries. Those claims had produced a wave of litigation over analytics pixels.

Earlier drafts also reached CIPA’s wiretap section (631) and confidential-recording section (632). That language was dropped before the bill passed. Sections 631 and 632 are the CIPA claims in the Otter and Granola cases, so the reform does not change them. Recording a confidential conversation in California still requires everyone’s consent. We have read law-firm analyses of the signed bill rather than the chaptered text itself.

What this means if you are choosing a tool

The cases differ, but they ask the same question: does the vendor keep its own copy of the meeting and use it for its own purposes? Otter’s and Granola’s training defaults and Fireflies’s alleged voiceprints are all versions of that question.

So the three checks we recommend have not changed. They have only become easier to justify to a legal team:

1. Where does the audio go? A tool that processes on-device does not create a vendor copy at all. Hedy runs speech recognition on your device and, with Local AI on supported hardware, the AI too; MacWhisper transcribes locally. Our fact sheet lists where each tool processes.
2. Does the vendor train on it by default? If yes, turn the opt-out on for every user, not just the ones who find the setting. See which notetakers train on your data.
3. Who tells the other participants? No tool removes this duty, Hedy included. A bot announces itself badly. A bot-free tool does not announce itself at all. Say it out loud at the start of the call.

For shortlists, see our privacy guide and guide for lawyers. To compare the architectures directly, see Hedy vs Otter.ai, Granola vs Hedy and Fireflies.ai vs Hedy.

Sources: the court’s 13 August 2026 order (Dkt. 68), the 20 August protective-order order (Dkt. 72), the 16 September scheduling order (Dkt. 79) and Otter’s answer (Dkt. 80) in the CourtListener docket for No. 5:25-cv-06911; the Granola complaint (Dkt. 1) and stipulation (Dkt. 21) in No. 3:26-cv-07926; Microsoft Message Center MC1459141.

This is analysis, not legal advice. Court dates change; check the docket before relying on any date here.