Meta sued over AI-assisted layoffs affecting workers on medical leave

Twenty-six Meta employees filed a 71-page lawsuit on Monday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Oakland division, alleging that the company's AI-assisted systems disproportionately affected workers with disabilities and those who took protected medical or family leave during recent layoffs. The plaintiffs are seeking to halt the layoffs while their claims proceed.

According to the complaint, Meta did not assemble the termination list through managers' considered judgment. Instead, the company relied on a range of AI-assisted systems: its Metamate large language model assistant, employee-trained 'second brain' agents, AI token-usage dashboards, and algorithmic performance-ranking tools. The lawsuit alleges that Meta failed to account for employees on protected medical or family leave before using those metrics in the layoff process. The complaint states: "The result was that employees who took protected leaves were disproportionately selected for layoff, based on scoring that not only failed to account for their protected leaves, but in effect penalized the employees for exercising their legal rights to these leaves."

Meta has denied the allegations. Communications Director Andy Stone posted on X: "These claims lack merit. Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI." Stone's response asserts that human judgment, not algorithms, drove the decisions.

The layoffs began in May when Meta notified roughly 8,000 employees—about 10% of its workforce—as part of a broader restructuring tied to the company's growing AI investments. In early July, CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly told employees that the company's AI-driven reorganization had not progressed as rapidly as executives had expected. On the same Monday the lawsuit was filed, Meta accelerated its AI infrastructure buildout, with the cost of its Hyperion data center project in Louisiana exceeding $50 billion（約8兆円）, underscoring the company's massive ongoing commitment to AI expansion.

The lawsuit reflects growing concerns about how large companies use AI in high-stakes employment decisions. The complaint centers on a specific gap in Meta's process: the use of performance metrics that did not account for protected leave status. Under U.S. employment law, workers on medical or family leave retain legal protections, and any decision-making process that penalizes them for exercising those rights—whether intentionally or through algorithmic oversight—can expose companies to legal liability. Meta's defense that "people, not AI" made the decisions does not directly address the lawsuit's core allegation: that the company failed to account for protected status before feeding data into AI systems that then influenced human decision-makers.

The timing is notable. Meta began these layoffs in May, just as the company was ramping up AI investment and infrastructure spending. CEO Mark Zuckerberg later acknowledged that the AI-driven reorganization had proceeded slower than expected, suggesting the company was under pressure to move quickly on both the restructuring and AI buildout. The company is now accelerating its Hyperion data center project in Louisiana, which exceeds $50 billion（約8兆円） in cost—underscoring the scale of Meta's AI ambitions and the urgency with which it is pursuing them.