Consumer Apps · Education · Structural / no discrete incident
Duolingo
Headline
Duolingo's own CEO has publicly admitted that roughly 20% of AI-generated stories were 'just pure slop' (his loose estimate, not data)…
Not independently verified. Verification status: Unverified - heuristic first draft. Publish state: draft unverified.
Duolingo's own CEO has publicly admitted that roughly 20% of AI-generated stories were 'just pure slop' (his loose estimate, not data) — meaning a meaningful share of what you're actually practicing on is machine-generated content that didn't pass the company's own quality bar. Duolingo also drew significant backlash for a 2025 'AI-first' internal memo, reportedly including phasing out contractors for work AI can handle,, prompting the CEO to later walk it back and insist no full-time employees were cut — by the CEO's own loose estimate, about one in five AI-generated items was unusable before filtering.
- Severity
- Evidence tierUnassigned
- Claims confirmed
- Last verified2026-08-04
Primary source. None recorded — Unverified - heuristic first draft.
Terms
Arbitration
Not independently confirmed this pass — standard binding arbitration + class action waiver expected.
Data sharing
NAMED as one of the apps from which Google's Firebase analytics tool harvested user activity data (alongside Uber, Venmo, Shazam, the New York Times, and Instagram) as part of the $425M Google privacy judgment described in the Google row above — this is Google's data collection occurring THROUGH Duolingo's app via an embedded third-party SDK, not necessarily a separate finding about Duolingo's own first-party data practices.
Fees and billing
Not itemized this pass.
Contacts
Privacy contact. Not recorded.
Legal notice. Not verified this pass. If publicly traded: SEC Form 10-K cover page gives the official corporate address; the Secretary of State business-entity search in the state of incorporation gives the registered agent, which must accept service. If private: the state registered agent is usually the only reliable route.
Mailing address. Not recorded.
Evidence
No claims have been itemized for this row yet.
No sources are on file for this row yet.
Source vault
Link status: Candidate - not yet fetched
| Document | Last fetch | |
|---|---|---|
| Privacy policy duolingo.com/privacy | Not fetched yet | NO (HTML only) |
| Terms of service duolingo.com/terms | Not fetched yet | NO (HTML only) |
| Website No URL recorded | Not fetched yet | — |
| Primary source No URL recorded Verification: Unverified - heuristic first draft | Not fetched yet | — |
Enforcement
No enforcement actions are linked to this row.
State statute
No HQ state on file, so no state statute applies by headquarters.