Whether an AI wearable can legally record a conversation depends on where the wearer is standing and whether the law treats an always-on device the same way it treats a person who chooses to record their own conversation. There is no single yes or no answer that applies in every state, and that gap is the actual problem with pendant style recorders that listen all day instead of for one conversation at a time.
Recording consent law splits into two broad approaches. Some states only require one person in a conversation to agree to being recorded, and that person can be the one holding the device. Other states require every participant to agree before a recording is legal. An always-on wearable strains both approaches, because it rarely limits itself to conversations its wearer is actually part of. It also picks up the coworker leaning over to ask a quick question, the friend who sits down for five minutes, and the stranger at the next table. This article lays out the general legal framework, flags the specific gray area around passive capture, and explains state by state variation in broad terms. It is general information, not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for checking the current statute in your state or talking to a lawyer.
One-party consent versus two-party consent, explained
Federal law sets the floor for the entire country. Under 18 U.S.C. 2511(2)(d), a recording is lawful if at least one participant in the conversation consents to it, and federal law allows that participant to be the person doing the recording. Most states follow this same rule, usually called one-party consent. A person can record a phone call, a meeting, or an in-person conversation they are part of without telling anyone else, unless their state sets a stricter standard.
A smaller group of states requires more. In these states, often labeled two-party consent states though the more accurate term is all-party consent since it covers groups of any size, every person taking part in a conversation has to agree before recording it is legal. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a legal resource built for journalists who record interviews as part of their job, counts roughly eleven states in this stricter category, including California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington. A few more states split the difference by conversation type: Oregon and Missouri require all-party consent for in-person conversations but not phone calls, while Connecticut and Nevada apply all-party consent to phone calls but not in-person conversations.
What counts as a party to a conversation
Every version of this law turns on one term: party. A party is someone actively speaking or listening in the exchange, not simply a person standing nearby. Legal guidance on state audio surveillance rules describes a party as the speaker or the listener directly engaged in that specific exchange. Someone who is not a party and records or intercepts a conversation anyway is generally committing a separate offense, eavesdropping, treated by most state statutes as a distinct violation from a participant's consent lapse. Most state eavesdropping statutes specifically bar capturing a conversation to which a person is not a party, without permission from someone who is.
A second idea sits alongside party status: reasonable expectation of privacy. Legal guidance on this topic generally agrees that consent requirements matter most where people expect privacy, most notably inside a home, and matter less in public spaces where a conversation can be overheard by anyone standing nearby. A wearable recording a loud conversation on a train platform sits in a different legal position than the same wearable recording a conversation inside someone's living room, even before any state's specific consent rule gets applied.
The open question nobody has fully answered
One-party consent law was written around a specific scene: a person who is part of a conversation decides to record it. An AI pendant does not behave that way for everything it captures. It stays on through an entire day, which means it often records exchanges the wearer is not actually part of: two colleagues talking behind them in a hallway, one side of a phone call overheard through a thin wall, a conversation among strangers at the next table. In each of those moments, whether the wearer counts as a party to what got recorded is not clearly answered by one-party consent law, since the wearer was not speaking or listening in that specific exchange at all.
Michigan, one of the all-party consent states named above, makes this distinction explicit rather than implied in the text of its own statute. Its all-party consent requirement applies specifically to recordings made by someone who is not involved in the conversation being recorded, which comes close to describing, in the text of an actual law, the exact always-on wearable scenario this article is about. That is a narrow example from one state, not a national rule, but it shows the underlying question is not hypothetical. Lawmakers in at least one state have already drawn a line between a participant recording their own conversation and a device capturing someone else's.
This gap has not been tested much in court, and the people who study it describe it as unresolved rather than settled. Catherine Crump, a technology law expert at UC Berkeley, has said that a person could face criminal penalties for recording a conversation without all required consent, speaking specifically about California's all-party consent rule, one of the strictest in the country. Chris Hoofnagle, director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, has raised a narrower possibility: if a device is obvious enough that people can see it is actively recording, a person who notices it and keeps talking anyway might be giving implied consent for that part of the conversation. Even if that reasoning holds up, it would only cover the person who noticed the device and chose to keep talking. It would not obviously extend to a second, separate conversation happening a few feet away between two people who never looked at the wearer at all. Lawmakers have started responding to that same gap directly. A California bill introduced in February 2026, SB 1130, would specifically regulate wearable recording devices, defined as devices worn on or attached to the body rather than held in the hand, treating them differently from how existing law treats a person recording their own conversation. As of this article's publication the bill has not been signed into law and is still moving through the legislature, but its introduction shows the always-on wearable question described above is now attracting direct legislative attention, not just legal commentary.
None of this settles whether a specific always-on wearable is legal to use in a specific room. Consent law is set state by state and sometimes varies further by conversation type, and the answer can change based on where the other people in the conversation are physically located, not just where the wearer lives. Treat every general statement in this article as a starting point for checking the current statute in your state, not as a final answer.
Why always-on pendants make this messier than a phone recorder
A phone recorder is usually switched on for one specific conversation, by someone who made a deliberate choice to press record. An always-on wearable works differently by design. Pendant and pin style AI recorders, a category that included devices like Limitless and still includes Plaud, are built to run for long stretches, transcribing meetings, calls, and casual hallway conversation into a searchable log without the wearer picking a moment to start. Meta acquired Limitless in December 2025 and stopped selling the pendant as new hardware, though other devices in the category, including Plaud, are still sold. Reporting on this device category by the San Francisco Standard found that many people wearing them treat consent from everyone around them as simply assumed, rather than something actively obtained conversation by conversation. Some manufacturers have experimented with transcribing speech into text without keeping the underlying audio, on the theory that a text log falls outside recording law entirely. Legal experts quoted in that reporting were skeptical this distinction would hold up if it were ever tested in court, since the same private conversation is still being captured and stored, just in a different format.
Some devices also add a visible light or audible signal meant to show that recording is active, the kind of obvious indicator that Hoofnagle pointed to as a possible route to implied consent. Whether that actually works as consent depends on whether the people nearby notice the signal and understand what it means, not just on whether the device has one. A light that a person never sees or never learns to recognize cannot reasonably be called notice. People who work around coworkers wearing these devices have also reported adjusting what they say out loud in casual settings, treating an ordinary hallway comment as if it might end up in a permanent, searchable transcript.
One-party versus two-party consent states at a glance
The table below summarizes the general pattern described above. Treat it as a starting reference, not a legal determination for any specific state, device, or conversation.
| Category | One-party consent states | Two-party (all-party) consent states |
|---|---|---|
| Who has to agree to the recording | Only one person in the conversation, who can be the person doing the recording | Every person taking part in the conversation |
| Roughly how common | The majority of states, close to 38 plus Washington, D.C. | A smaller group, roughly a dozen, including California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Washington |
| Recording your own phone call without announcing it | Generally allowed | Generally not allowed without telling the other person first |
| A wearable capturing a bystander who never spoke to the wearer | Legal footing is unclear, since the wearer may not be a party to that specific exchange | Same open question, layered on top of an already stricter baseline rule |
| What to do regardless of which category applies | Confirm the current statute in your specific state before relying on this table | Confirm the current statute in your specific state before relying on this table |
What can actually happen if a recording breaks consent law
Consequences vary by state, and a general article cannot responsibly summarize every state's penalty structure, since that is exactly the kind of specific question that needs a local, current answer rather than a general one. Broadly speaking, unlawful recording can carry criminal exposure in states with strict all-party consent rules. California is a commonly cited example: Crump's warning about potential criminal penalties, reported by the San Francisco Standard, was made specifically about California's law, one of the toughest in the country. Separately, a recording made in violation of consent law can create civil liability, meaning the person who was recorded may be able to sue over it, and in some circumstances a recording obtained unlawfully can be excluded as evidence if a dispute ends up in court. None of that changes based on whether a phone, a laptop, or a pendant did the recording. The law is generally concerned with the act of capturing a conversation, not the shape of the device that captured it.
Consent law also varies outside the United States, and this article focuses on the U.S. framework described above. A wearable that is fine to use under a one-party consent state's rule is not automatically fine to use while traveling internationally, or while talking with someone sitting in a different country. Treat cross-border recording as a separate question with its own answer, not an extension of whichever state's rule the wearer happens to know best.
Questions worth asking before you wear one
- Check the consent law in the state where the wearer lives and where the device gets used most, since some states set a stricter standard than the federal one-party baseline.
- Check the consent law that applies to the people spoken with most often, since courts in stricter states have applied their own rule to conversations that cross state lines.
- Look for a visible or audible recording indicator, and judge honestly whether people nearby would actually notice and understand it, rather than assuming the indicator alone counts as legal notice.
- Ask whether a workplace, school, or venue has its own recording policy layered on top of state law. A one-party consent state does not cancel out an employer's internal rule against recording meetings.
- Consider telling people out loud when a wearable is active, especially in a private setting such as an office, a home, or a medical appointment, where expectation of privacy and legal risk are both highest.
Consent law governs whether a conversation can be captured in the first place. What happens afterward, who can see the transcript, how long it stays stored, whether it feeds into someone else's model, is a separate question with its own separate answer. Some AI memory tools, including MemX, are built to keep captured material private by architecture: per-user isolation, encryption at rest, and no training on user data, instead of pooling recordings into one shared set. That addresses what happens to a conversation once it has already been lawfully recorded. It does not answer whether the recording was legal to make in the first place, and no piece of software can make that determination on a wearer's behalf.
The honest bottom line
The safest habit is treating an always-on wearable the way a careful reporter treats a recorder: check the applicable law before pressing record, assume the stricter rule applies when the answer is unclear, and do not rely on a blinking light to do the work of an actual heads up to the people nearby. Consent law was written for people deciding to record their own conversations. It is still catching up to a device that never stops listening on someone else's behalf, and until legislatures or courts close that gap directly, the honest answer to whether a specific wearable is legal in a specific room is to check the current statute in that state, or ask a lawyer, rather than rely on this article or any other general guide for a final answer.
01Is it illegal to record a conversation without telling the other person?
It depends on the state. Most states only require one person in the conversation to agree, and that can be the person recording. Roughly a dozen states require every participant to agree first. Check the current law in your specific state before recording, since rules vary and change over time.
02Which states require everyone's consent before a conversation can be recorded?
Around a dozen states use all-party consent. Commonly cited examples include California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Washington. A few more states apply all-party rules only to phone calls or only to in-person conversations, so confirm the exact rule where the conversation actually happens.
03Can an AI pendant legally record people who never agreed to be recorded?
That is not fully settled. One-party consent law assumes the person recording is a participant in the conversation. A wearable that captures a conversation between other people, one its wearer was not actually part of, does not clearly fit that assumption, and this scenario has not been tested much in court yet.
04Does a blinking light on a recording device count as legal consent?
It might support an implied consent argument if people clearly notice the light and keep talking anyway, according to legal experts who study this area. A light nobody actually notices is a much weaker argument, since implied consent depends on the person being aware, not just the device having an indicator.
05Is recording a coworker legally different from recording a friend?
State consent law applies either way, but many workplaces add their own recording policy on top of it. A one-party consent state does not cancel an employer's internal rule against recording meetings, so check workplace policy separately from your state's general consent law.
