Meta sued over AI-driven layoffs targeting disabled workers

Meta is defending itself against a lawsuit filed by 26 employees in US District Court for the Northern District of California that alleges the company used artificial intelligence systems to select 8,000 workers for termination. The plaintiffs claim that the layoff process systematically targeted workers with disabilities and employees who took protected medical or family leave.

According to the complaint, Meta deployed a suite of internal AI tools to score and rank employees. These included 'Metamate,' employee-trained 'second-brain' agents that presumably learned from employee behavior, keystroke- and activity-monitoring software, AI-token-usage dashboards that tracked how much workers utilized Meta's AI tools, and algorithmically assisted systems for performance ranking and calibration. Notably, employees were graded partly on their adoption of Meta's own AI tools, with the company's internal dashboards sorting workers into categories such as 'AI Native,' 'AI First,' and 'AI Enabled.'

The lawsuit's core allegation is that these tools, by design, could not fairly evaluate employees on protected leave or those with disabilities. The complaint states: "Those tools draw on inputs—performance ratings, calibration scores, productivity and output metrics, 'AI-native' ratings, and AI-token consumption—that, by design, cannot be accumulated by an employee who is on protected medical or family leave, or whose output is reduced by a disability." This structural disadvantage potentially violated federal employment protections.

Reuters reports that this is apparently the first lawsuit against a major US company to challenge the use of AI in conducting layoffs. Meta has disputed the allegations, stating that humans made workforce management decisions, not AI. The company has not provided additional comment on the specific allegations regarding monitoring practices or discrimination.

The lawsuit represents a novel legal challenge to the use of AI in human resources decisions at scale. While companies have long used data and metrics to inform layoff decisions, the complaint alleges that Meta's approach systematically encoded discrimination by design—its monitoring tools could not account for the reduced output or activity that naturally results from a disability accommodation or protected leave. Employees on medical or family leave would necessarily accumulate fewer keystroke metrics, lower AI-token usage, and reduced productivity scores, placing them at a structural disadvantage in any system that treated those metrics as selection criteria. The lawsuit hinges on whether Meta's use of these AI systems, in the aggregate, violated employment law protections even if individual human managers made the final decisions. Meta's response—that people, not AI, made the decisions—does not directly address whether the AI tools improperly shaped the candidate pool before human review occurred.