Twenty-six Meta employees are suing the company, alleging it used artificial intelligence systems to systematically target workers on protected medical and family leave during its May layoff of roughly 8,000 people — nearly 10% of its global workforce.
If the claims hold, it means one of corporate America's loudest voices on diversity and inclusion built an algorithm that punishes workers for exercising their legal rights the moment it needed to cut costs. The lawsuit, filed Monday in Oakland federal court, alleges Meta used what it calls a "constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems" — including an internal bot called "Metamate," employee-trained "second-brain" agents, keystroke and activity monitoring, AI-token-usage dashboards, and algorithmic performance ranking — to score, rank, and select employees for termination. Workers were classified by AI adoption stage: "AI Native," "AI First," and "AI Enabled," according to the complaint.
The problem, the plaintiffs say, is that those metrics — productivity, output, AI-token consumption — "by design, cannot be accumulated by an employee who is on protected medical or family leave, or whose output is reduced by a disability." The system did not adjust scores for employees on leave or seeking accommodations. Ars Technica reported that one employee was told of her layoff "the day before her water broke."
All 26 plaintiffs had requested leave or disability accommodations in the 24 months before being selected for layoffs, according to the complaint. They are asking the court for a preliminary injunction to block the terminations — scheduled to take effect July 22 — pending an independent audit of the algorithmically assisted selection process.
Meta denies the claims. "Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI," a spokesperson told multiple outlets.
Reuters noted this is the first lawsuit against a major U.S. company challenging the alleged use of AI in conducting layoffs. It follows a separate ruling last month where a federal judge allowed discrimination claims against Workday over its AI-powered hiring tools to proceed.
The New York Post reported that Meta's internal systems drew on keystrokes, screen content, emails, and browser history to rank employees — effectively tanking scores for anyone who had been out on leave. The suit also alleges Meta failed to test its AI systems for bias, which would violate new legislation in California and New York City.
Meanwhile, Meta is pouring between $125 billion and $145 billion into AI infrastructure this year alone. The International Business Times reported that Meta expanded its Hyperion data center project in rural Louisiana from a $27 billion plan to more than $50 billion, scaling to 5 gigawatts of computing power. CFO Susan Li told investors the company doesn't "really know what the optimal size of the company will be in the future." CEO Mark Zuckerberg said "one or two people are building something in a week that would have previously taken dozens of people months." Another 7,000 staffers were reassigned to AI-focused roles.
So the trade is explicit: American workers traded for computing power, and the algorithm that decided who goes apparently couldn't be bothered to account for medical leave. The question now is whether the law catches up to the machine before the next round.