Twenty-six former Meta employees are suing the company for allegedly using biased AI tools that “disproportionately selected” people who took sick leave as candidates for termination, Reuters reports. All of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit were affected by the latest round of layoffs at Meta, which cut about 8,000 employees in hopes of offsetting the company’s investments in AI and data center infrastructure.
Meta is accused of using “a constellation of artificial intelligence systems” to select which employees to remove. These are claimed to have included an in-house AI assistant called “Metamate”, employee-trained “second brain” agents, AI token usage dashboards and “keystroke and activity monitoring data”. The purported goal was to identify and rank employees based on things like their performance and productivity, but also how “AI native” they are and how many AI tokens they use. The problem, the lawsuit says, is that Meta’s system failed to account for employees on family or medical leave, or whose disabilities might affect their performance, even though they were in situations where they couldn’t use more tokens or interact with other AI tools.
Woozad asked Meta to comment on the lawsuit and its use of AI. In a statement made to Reutersthe company said the suit lacked merit because the layoffs always involved human input. “Workforce management and organizational decisions have been and are made by people, not AI,” Meta said.
Key to the lawsuit’s argument, each of the plaintiffs “took, requested, or was permitted to take legally protected leave; attempted to take protected leave and suffered interference; or requested or received a reasonable accommodation because of a disability,” within 24 months of termination. Laws such as the Family and Medical Leave Act expressly prohibit companies from considering employees to take protected leave as part of their employment decisions. At the state level, California’s Family Rights Act also prohibits it, and the state’s Fair Employment and Housing Act “prohibits the use of an automated decision-making system that produces disparate impact discrimination based on disability or sex, including pregnancy.”
The former employees are asking the court to block Meta from finalizing its layoffs “pending an independent audit of the algorithm-assisted selection process.” Due to the terms of Meta’s employment agreement, plaintiffs also intend to pursue their claims in arbitration.
Reuters first reported that Meta was recording keystrokes, mouse movements and clicks of its staff to train AI in April 2026. In addition to appearing invasive and creepy, the program allegedly violated European Union privacy laws. Meta chose to suspend the AI training program when it became apparent that private chats and transcripts recorded by the system were accessible to employees. Given the indignity of the company’s original plan, the idea that similar surveillance data could have been used to carry out layoffs is not particularly surprising.
