Jeremy Levine’s Zoom Rename Puts AI Recording’s Legal Risk on Display

Venture capitalist Jeremy Levine goes by a different name on Zoom now: “Jeremy Levine I do not consent to transcribing or recording.” The switch, first reported in a Wall Street Journal article on the boom in AI transcription apps, is only half a joke.

A federal judge in San Jose is deciding whether that kind of objection has to mean something. Otter.ai, the AI notetaker used across millions of meetings, is fighting a consolidated class action that could decide whether decades-old wiretap statutes reach a bot that silently joins a call. Levine’s rename lands right on top of that fight, whether he intended it or not.

A Zoom Display Name Becomes a Legal Disclaimer

The Journal’s reporting captured how normal always-on recording has become inside tech circles. Levine described the trend as “socially unacceptable behavior” that can kill spontaneous conversation before it starts. Fellow investor Eric Bahn told the paper he now assumes every meeting with a founder is being recorded, often before he even notices a phone sliding across the table toward him.

One founder described a habit that goes further. She records most of her first dates using the note-taking app Granola, then runs the transcript through Anthropic’s Claude chatbot afterward to check whether she came across as “engaging or empathetic” and who did most of the talking. Dating in San Francisco, as TechCrunch put it, is rough.

Granola’s No-Bot Pitch Just Hit a $1.5 Billion Valuation

Granola is not a fringe app. It became a unicorn this year, and its own notepad built for meetings pitch is built around running quietly in the background rather than joining a call as a visible bot.

TechCrunch reported the company raised a $125 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation in March 2026, up from $250 million less than a year earlier. Forbes had already flagged the shift months before that, reporting that pens and laptops had vanished from VC meetings as investors adopted the app.

The scale of the wider category explains why Levine felt he needed a workaround in the first place.

• 25 million users: Otter’s tools have processed more than 1 billion meetings since the company launched in 2016, according to NPR’s reporting on the litigation against it.
• $3.47 billion: the estimated size of the global AI meeting assistant market in 2025, before an expected climb to $4.31 billion in 2026.
• 58%: the share of U.S. workers on hybrid schedules as of 2023, the structural tailwind behind the category’s growth.
• $1.5 billion: Granola’s own valuation as of March 2026, quadruple what it was worth ten months earlier.

Otter, Fireflies, Read AI and Granola are all chasing the same idea: that conversations are data nobody has fully captured yet. The legal system is now asking whether that data was ever theirs to take.

In California, Every Participant Has to Say Yes First

California is why Levine’s rename might matter beyond etiquette. The state’s Invasion of Privacy Act requires every party to a confidential conversation to agree before it gets recorded, not just the host who clicked the button.

Penal Code Section 632 bars recording without that agreement. Section 637.2 lets a victim collect $5,000 per violation or three times actual damages, whichever is larger. Federal law, by contrast, generally only requires one participant’s consent, with civil damages capped at the greater of $10,000 per violation or $100 a day.

Sacramento tried to soften that exposure for AI notetakers last year. Senate Bill 690 would have carved out a business exemption to the state’s wiretap law. It passed the Senate without a single no vote, then stalled in the Assembly. Lawmakers designated it a two-year bill, meaning it cannot take effect before 2027 at the earliest.

Consent Rules Change the Moment You Cross a State Line

The legal map underneath every AI notetaker is a patchwork. A recording that is fine in one state can be a violation two states over.

Otter’s entire legal defense turns on which side of that map its bot falls on, and whether a piece of software invited by one person can count as a separate, uninvited party to everyone else’s conversation.

The Federal Case Testing Every AI Notetaker

Four lawsuits filed in the Northern District of California since August 2025 have been folded into one fight, In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation. Here is how it has moved.

1. Aug. 15, 2025: Justin Brewer, a California resident, sues Otter.ai, alleging its Notetaker bot records participants without consent and shares the audio with the company to help train its AI.
2. Aug. 26, 2025: A second suit, Walker v. Otter.ai, adds a different claim, that Otter captures and stores voiceprints without written consent, violating Illinois’ biometric privacy law.
3. Sept. 3, 2025: A third case, Theus v. Otter.ai, accuses the company of covert surveillance, saying its bot joins meetings silently and sends transcripts to attendees without notice.
4. Dec. 5, 2025: Plaintiffs file a consolidated complaint combining claims under the Wiretap Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and California’s privacy law, seeking a nationwide class stretching back to August 2023.
5. May 20, 2026: Otter’s motion to dismiss gets a hearing in Courtroom 7 of the federal courthouse in San Jose. The judge takes the matter under submission.
6. Mid-June 2026: No ruling has been issued yet.

Otter has denied that any unlawful interception occurred. Its chief executive made the company’s broader argument in blunt terms.

If they accuse us, then they could accuse everyone else, all the tools you heard about doing meeting notes. My view is that we are on the right side of history.

Sam Liang, Otter’s chief executive, made that case in an October 2025 interview with TechCrunch. Attorney Joseph Lazzarotti, who writes the Jackson Lewis Workplace Privacy Report, took the opposite view, calling Otter’s single-consent design “risky in states like California that require all-party consent.”

Does Levine’s Zoom Trick Hold Up in Court?

Probably not on its own, but it likely cannot hurt. A display name is not an in-meeting consent screen, but it creates a timestamped record that Levine withheld consent, which is close to the exact fact California’s wiretap law asks a plaintiff to prove.

Zoom already builds a consent step into meetings that use its own AI Companion. Participants see a pop-up and a small icon, and declining is supposed to block them from unmuting until they respond. But Zoom’s own community support forum confirms the workaround only goes so far: if someone stays in the meeting without clicking through, their side of the conversation gets captured whether they click through or not.

The same forum notes that opting out on your own account will not protect you if someone else on the call has AI Companion switched on. A freelancer or consultant sitting in on a client’s meeting is stuck with whatever settings the host chose, with no way to audit them beforehand.

The Recordings Nobody Plays Back

TechCrunch’s own writeup on Levine’s rename raised a separate question: if every meeting, watercooler chat and date gets transcribed, who is actually reading any of it. Most of it, realistically, never gets replayed.

That does not mean it disappears. Otter’s lawsuit alleges the company retains conversational data indefinitely and uses it to refine its own speech-recognition models, without separately asking the people who never signed up for an Otter account in the first place.

Otter and Fireflies are not the only companies facing this kind of reckoning this year. Apple is separately defending a suit over a Hide My Email flaw it twice said had been fixed, part of a broader run of privacy litigation now working through federal courts.

Judge Lee’s ruling on the motion to dismiss, whenever it lands, will be among the first in the country to say whether a wiretap law built for tape recorders reaches an AI bot that never asked permission to be in the room.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I Stop an AI Notetaker From Recording Me on Someone Else’s Zoom Call?

Not entirely, if you are a guest on the host’s account. University privacy guidance suggests muting your audio, keeping your camera off and staying out of the chat window to limit what gets captured, since hosts and their administrators generally control whether a notetaker can be disabled at all.

Does Granola Use a Visible Bot Like Otter or Fireflies?

No. Granola runs locally on a laptop or phone rather than joining a call as a separate visible participant. Forbes has noted that design cuts both ways: it removes the awkward bot icon from the call, but it also makes it harder for anyone else on the line to know a recording is happening at all.

What Would a Ruling Against Otter Mean for Other Notetaker Apps?

The proposed nationwide class covers anyone whose conversations were captured from August 15, 2023, onward, a period that would sweep in years of everyday meetings. Fireflies.ai already faces separate biometric-privacy suits in Illinois, and lawyers watching the case say a ruling here would be one of the first tests of whether old wiretap statutes reach any AI bot built the same way.

Is Zoom Itself Named as a Defendant in These Lawsuits?

No. The litigation targets third-party notetaker companies, Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai, that plug into Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams rather than the video platforms themselves. Zoom’s own AI Companion consent prompts are a separate system from the bots being sued.

Do AI Meeting Apps Use Recordings to Train Their Own Models?

Otter’s plaintiffs allege yes. Court filings claim the company keeps recordings indefinitely and feeds them into its speech-recognition systems, a use the lawsuit says was never disclosed to non-account-holders on the call, only to the person who installed the app.

Disclaimer: This article explains publicly reported litigation and state recording laws for general information only, not legal advice; consent rules vary by state and can change, so anyone facing a specific situation should consult a licensed attorney, and figures here reflect court records and reporting available as of July 18, 2026.