Twenty-six current and former Meta employees have sued the company in federal court in Oakland, California, alleging it used artificial intelligence systems to select workers for mass layoffs in a way that disproportionately targeted those on medical, parental or family leave. The 71-page complaint, filed late Monday, forms part of Meta’s broader reduction of roughly 8,000 employees, about 10 percent of its workforce, that the company began notifying staff about on May 20.
How the AI Scoring System Allegedly Worked
According to the lawsuit, Meta deployed a “constellation of internal artificial intelligence systems,” including algorithmically assisted performance rankings, keystroke and activity-monitoring data, and AI token-usage dashboards, to determine who would be terminated, rather than relying on the considered judgment of managers familiar with each employee’s actual work. The complaint’s central allegation is structural: these scoring systems, by design, cannot accumulate meaningful data for an employee on protected medical or family leave, or whose output is reduced by disability, meaning such employees were mathematically disadvantaged regardless of their underlying performance.
The lawsuit states Meta did not account for protected leave when calculating employee scores, and did not pause the system to allow the individualised, leave-neutral review the law requires. Among the plaintiffs, roughly half had taken leave for caregiving or pregnancy-related reasons: eight are women who took maternity or pregnancy-related leave, four are men who took parental leave, and one woman had taken leave to care for a family member followed by bereavement leave.
Individual Cases Cited in the Complaint
The lawsuit highlights specific plaintiffs to illustrate the pattern. A female scientist alleges she received a termination notice just two days before giving birth while on approved pregnancy leave. An engineer alleges his performance rating dropped after he took medical leave following an injury. Another employee, a manager, alleges he was removed from his position just 16 days after starting medical leave.
The plaintiffs argue the layoffs violated multiple state and federal laws, including the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, and separately invoke disparate impact liability, the civil rights principle that a facially neutral policy can still be discriminatory if it disproportionately burdens a protected group without being necessary to the job, a legal theory the Trump administration has directed federal agencies to deprioritise in enforcement. Because Meta’s employment agreements generally require individual arbitration of workplace disputes, the plaintiffs are seeking only a preliminary court order to preserve their employment status while their claims proceed to arbitration, citing irreversible harms, including loss of health coverage during pregnancy or medical treatment, forfeited leave rights and unvested equity, that would follow if the layoffs are finalised first. Their lawyers have also asked the court to approve an independent audit of Meta’s AI tools to clarify why these 26 specific workers, all on leave or approved disability accommodation, were selected.
The Monitoring Programme and Meta’s Response
The case is intertwined with a separate controversy over an employee-monitoring programme Meta introduced earlier this year, which captured keystrokes, mouse activity, browser history, messages, emails and location data on company devices. According to the complaint, employees learned about the programme through a low-visibility internal post made by an engineer rather than a senior leader, and on at least some teams received no consent or acknowledgment prompt at all, with no option to opt out initially available. CEO Mark Zuckerberg had said the data was intended to train Meta’s AI systems on real employee behaviour. Employee backlash escalated over subsequent months, with more than 1,600 employees signing a petition alleging the programme violated their privacy, prompting Zuckerberg to pause it in June.
Meta has firmly rejected the lawsuit’s allegations. A company spokesperson said the claims lack merit and are not based on facts, stating that workforce management and organisational decisions were and continue to be made by people, not AI. The case adds to a broader pattern of scrutiny facing major technology employers over AI-assisted workforce decisions this year, and is likely to intensify debate over transparency, consent and accountability as AI-based evaluation tools become more embedded in corporate human resources decisions worldwide.
