Twenty-six Meta employees have sued the company, alleging its AI-assisted layoff process disproportionately targeted workers who were on medical, parental, or family leave -- or who had an approved disability accommodation. It's one of the first major lawsuits to directly challenge an AI-driven layoff decision.
What the Lawsuit Alleges
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Oakland, California, claims Meta used a combination of internal AI systems, keystroke and activity-monitoring data, AI token-usage dashboards, and algorithmically assisted performance rankings to help decide who would be laid off. The core allegation is structural: these scores and ratings, the lawsuit says, "by design, cannot be accumulated by an employee who is on protected medical or family leave, or whose output is reduced by a disability."
In other words, if the system measures output and activity to rank employees, someone who was legally out on leave -- or working reduced hours because of a disability -- would show up as a low performer through no fault of their own, simply because the metric doesn't account for why their output was lower.
Who's Bringing the Case
All 26 plaintiffs in the lawsuit either took protected leave, or requested and received a reasonable accommodation for a disability. Many took pregnancy or parental leave, during which they weren't working and therefore had reduced measured output during that period. Others were on medical leave -- one plaintiff disclosed a "serious health condition and disability" that had already been approved by Meta's own leave provider.
These 26 employees are among roughly 8,000 people -- about 10% of Meta's workforce -- the company said it would lay off starting in May. All 26 have been notified of their layoffs but remained employed at the time of filing, with separations set to begin July 22.
Why This Is a First-of-Its-Kind Case
Lawsuits over AI-assisted hiring have become increasingly common, but this is one of the first major cases to challenge an AI-influenced layoff decision directly -- arguing that using automated, activity-based metrics to rank employees for termination can build discrimination into the process by design, even without any explicit intent to target protected workers.
Why This Matters for Families
As more companies lean on AI systems to help make major decisions about people's jobs, cases like this one are an early test of how existing worker protections -- for medical leave, disability accommodations, and family leave -- hold up when the decision-maker is partly an algorithm. For families where a parent or caregiver's job security intersects with medical or family leave, this case is worth watching: it's a real, live example of what can go wrong when an AI system optimizes for a metric (output, activity) that doesn't account for the legal protections a person is entitled to.