Granola Encrypted Its Local Notes. Here’s the Full Timeline — and How to Get Your Data Out.

Granola keeps a copy of your notes on your device so the app opens quickly and works offline. On a Mac that copy lived at ~/Library/Application Support/Granola/cache-v3.json — readable JSON with your notes and transcripts. Granola had no public API, so users built on the cache.

The earliest tool we found, granola-ingest, was watching that file by December 2024. In May 2025 developer Joseph Thacker wrote up how he pulled notes into Obsidian, noting that when he asked Granola about an API, they said they “don't have an API.” Through 2025 a small ecosystem grew on top of the cache: MCP servers that let Claude search your meetings without any network call, Obsidian sync plugins, command-line exporters and a Raycast extension with nearly 8,000 installs.

None of this was official. But it meant that, in practice, a Granola user owned a local copy of their meeting history in an open format.

The argument broke out on March 16, when a16z partner Guido Appenzeller posted: “Sorry to see Granola going closed. They encrypted their local db, no local and no cloud API. In a world where notes are managed by agents, the app now has zero value. Any recommendations for good alternatives?” The post passed roughly 344,000 views. Others piled in — one reply called it “workflow lock in” — while Lightspeed's Michael Mignano, a Granola investor, called the criticism a “lazy assumption.”

The next day Granola CEO Chris Pedregal responded:

“We are actually trying to become more open, not closed… Our cache was not built for this (it can change at any point), so we launched our MCP to serve this need… A week ago, we updated how we store data in our cache and broke the workarounds. This is on us. Stupidly, we thought we had solved these use cases well enough with our MCP.”

He promised a public API “next week” and said Granola would look at making it work better for local agents — “whether that's expanding our MCP, launching a CLI, a local API, etc.” The API arrived. The encryption was not reversed, and as of September 2026 we found no official Granola CLI or local API.

Meeting notes are becoming the raw material for AI agents — the record of what was agreed that your assistant will draft from, search and act on. Whoever controls access to that record controls how you can use it. Granola's 2026 shows how quickly that control can move: a plain file on your disk became an encrypted cache, an MCP with a 30-day free window, and an API behind a paid plan.

It landed in a year when Granola was already under scrutiny for what it does with notes. The Verge reported on April 2 that notes were “viewable to anyone with a link” by default and used for internal AI training unless users opt out, and on July 30 a class action, Chamberlain v. Granola, was filed in the Northern District of California over recording participants without consent.

The practical lesson is simple: when you choose a meeting notes app, ask where the finished notes live and in what format you can take them with you — not just whether a bot joins the call.