Five California PG&E customers filed a class-action complaint accusing the utility and an artificial intelligence vendor of secretly intercepting ordinary phone calls in violation of state privacy law. Courthouse News reported the suit landed Friday in Alameda County against Pacific Gas and Electric Company and PolyAI Technologies.
The plaintiffs say incoming customer calls connect to a PolyAI system that introduces itself as “Peggy, PG&E’s virtual assistant.” They allege the calls move to PolyAI’s platform, get transcribed, and may be kept and used by the vendor without clear prior consent.
At stake is whether a regulated utility can hand live customer service lines to a third-party machine that hears names, account data, and hardship details while callers still believe they are dealing only with PG&E. The complaint frames that practice as the exact conduct the California Invasion of Privacy Act was written to stop.
PG&E serves more than five million customers across the northern two-thirds of California. Its customer service lines take roughly 16 million calls a year. The five named plaintiffs are PG&E customers who say their calls were answered by Peggy and therefore intercepted, recorded, or transcribed by PolyAI.
They claim callers never receive a plain warning that a separate company is on the line. The utility’s recorded greeting only says the call may be recorded and tells callers to let the agent know if they do not want recording.
The plaintiffs put the gap in stark terms:
“This is not a case about website cookies, pixels or analytics software. It concerns the surreptitious, real-time wiretapping, eavesdropping upon, and recording of ordinary telephone calls, the precise conduct [California Invasion of Privacy Act] was enacted to prohibit.”
They add that the greeting fails to disclose the real setup:
“It does not say that the ‘agent’ is a machine operated by another company, that the call is being connected to that company’s servers, that the company is listening to and transcribing every word, or that the company may keep the caller’s voice and use it to build and sell its own products.”
On timing of consent, the complaint is direct. “Consent that can be withheld only after the interception has begun is not prior consent,” the plaintiffs says. They say anyone who objects still has to speak to Peggy first, so PolyAI has already received, analyzed, and acted on the caller’s voice before the objection can land.
The filing lists the kinds of information plaintiffs say went to PolyAI without callers knowing it. That list includes names linked to home addresses and telephone numbers, PG&E account and meter numbers, Social Security numbers, payment-card and bank-account information, details of outages and gas leaks, and, for many callers, household medical needs and financial hardship.
They also contend PG&E’s privacy policy never mentions AI use or any entity other than the utility handling call recordings. The same policy, they say, promises that service providers “must also not use your personal information for any purpose other than that for which it was given.” Plaintiffs claim that promise does not match PolyAI’s actual practices.
They assign active choices to the utility:
“PG&E, for its part, selected PolyAI, connected its telephone lines to PolyAI’s platform, scripted a greeting that conceals PolyAI’s existence, directed callers to a privacy policy that contradicts PolyAI’s actual practices, and allowed PolyAI to feature PG&E as a marquee customer.”
The complaint states the core legal charge in plain language. “Through the real-time wiretapping, eavesdropping and recording alleged herein, defendants violated and continue to violate the California Invasion of Privacy Act,” the plaintiffs wrote.
The suit seeks a court finding that PG&E and PolyAI violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act. It asks for statutory damages of $5,000 per violation. It also seeks an order forcing the defendants to permanently delete all recordings and transcripts drawn from the intercepted calls.
Plaintiffs want to represent a class of California residents and PG&E customers whose calls Peggy answered. The case style referenced in coverage is wagnor-v-polyai. Full plaintiff names and a complete docket number beyond that reference were not set out in the available report.
Neither PG&E nor PolyAI responded to a request for comment before press time. Authorities have not publicly confirmed any separate regulatory action tied to the filing. Investigators and the court will need to determine whether the described call path meets CIPA’s definitions of wiretapping, eavesdropping, and recording without proper consent, and whether the greeting and privacy policy supplied the prior notice the statute requires.
This remains a filed civil complaint, not a ruling. No conviction, admission, or adjudicated finding appears in the report. The absolute calendar date of the Friday filing was not given. The complaint does not, in the material provided, spell out every CIPA subsection pleaded or state when PG&E first switched lines to PolyAI.
What is on the record is the mechanism plaintiffs describe: live utility calls routed to a vendor AI, transcribed off PG&E’s own systems, with a greeting that plaintiffs say hides the third party and a privacy policy that plaintiffs say never names AI use. What must still be tested is whether that setup, if proven, crosses the statutory line and how many calls fall inside any certified class.
For a utility handling millions of accounts and millions of calls, the practical stakes are large. Account numbers, payment data, outage reports, and hardship facts are exactly the material people expect to share with their power company, not silently with an outside platform building commercial products from voice traffic.
California’s Invasion of Privacy Act has long drawn a hard line around telephone interception. Class counsel is now asking a state court to apply that line to modern AI call centers that sound like company agents while operating on someone else’s servers.
When essential utilities route the public’s most personal calls through hidden machines, the law either still means prior consent or it does not. Courts, not marketing scripts, get the last word.
