Meta is facing a new lawsuit from employees who claim the company used artificial intelligence tools to help select workers for layoffs, allegedly affecting people who had taken medical, parental, family or disability-related leave.
Lawsuit Challenges Meta’s Layoff Process
The lawsuit was filed Monday in federal court in California.
The Guardian reported that the case was filed in the northern district of California and points to Meta’s workforce reduction of about 8,000 employees earlier this year.
The employees allege that the layoff list was not built through ordinary manager judgment.
Fox Business reported that the lawsuit alleges Meta relied on internal AI systems, keystroke and activity-monitoring data, AI token-usage dashboards and algorithmically assisted performance rankings when making job cuts.
Workers Say Leave Was Treated Like Lower Performance
At the center of the lawsuit is the claim that Meta’s metrics disadvantaged workers who were legally allowed to be away from work.
The complaint says Meta’s AI tools gathered performance rankings, productivity and other metrics that do not exist when employees are on medical or family leave. The lawsuit says many of the factors used by Meta “by design, cannot be accumulated” by workers on protected medical or family leave, or by employees whose output is reduced by disability.
The plaintiffs argue that the system effectively penalized workers for using protected leave. Employees who took protected leaves were allegedly disproportionately selected for layoff because scoring failed to account for those leaves.
Pregnancy, Parental Leave and Disability Claims
The lawsuit includes specific examples of affected employees. One plaintiff was on approved pre-birth pregnancy leave and was notified of her layoff two days before giving birth, while another employee said he received a lowered rating after time off for an injury.
The gender-related claims also form part of the lawsuit. Eight employees were women who had taken maternity or pregnancy-related leave, four were men who had taken parental leave and one woman had taken leave to care for a family member and later bereavement leave. The Guardian reported that the plaintiffs are seeking relief that could include reinstatement, back pay, lost equity, benefits and other damages.
Meta Denies AI Made Layoff Decisions
Meta has rejected the allegations. The Guardian quoted a Meta spokesperson as saying, “These claims lack merit and are not based on facts,” and that workforce management and organizational decisions were made by people, not AI.
The workers are seeking court intervention before the layoffs take effect. The plaintiffs remain Meta employees until July 22 and are asking the court to preserve their employment status while arbitration is pending. The employees are seeking a preliminary ruling to block Meta from completing the layoffs while they pursue their claims in private arbitration.
AI Management Faces a Bigger Test
The case could become an important test for AI use in workplace decisions. AI decision-making in the workplace is becoming more legally fraught as employees raise concerns about bias, privacy and trust. The workers also claim Meta failed to test its AI systems for bias, allegedly violating newly adopted laws in California and New York City.
For Meta, the lawsuit is not only about layoffs. It raises a wider question about whether workplace monitoring systems can fairly evaluate employees whose productivity data is affected by pregnancy, disability, injury, caregiving or legally protected leave. Even if Meta insists people made the final decisions, the case shows how AI-assisted management tools can become legally risky when the data behind them may reflect absence rather than actual performance.
