In May, Meta laid off 10% of its workforce, impacting nearly 8,000 employees. On Monday, a group of current and former staffers filed a lawsuit alleging the company used AI to target those with disabilities or on medical or family leave for layoffs.
Instead of using the judgment of managers, the lawsuit claims Meta used a “constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems” to create the termination list.
These methods included a system referred to internally as “Metamate,” employee-trained “second-brain” agents, keystroke data, AI token-usage dashboards, and performance ranking and calibration—all factors that the lawsuit claims disadvantaged those who missed work due to medical conditions or to care for family members.
“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,” the lawsuit alleged.
The plaintiffs, who filed the lawsuit in federal court in Oakland, California, include 26 current and former Meta employees from California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington state, and Washington, D.C.
According to the lawsuit, one plaintiff was selected to be laid off while on approved pre-birth leave. Another plaintiff’s manager discouraged the plaintiff from taking medical leave, telling him senior leadership would “definitely” terminate or nominate him for layoffs—and when confronted with Washington’s leave-protection law, the manager allegedly responded, “This is Meta,” and “if the company wants something, they make it happen.”
Multiple plaintiffs also claimed their AI-usage dashboard scores dropped during leave because the system logged those absences as disengagement.
While Meta’s employment contracts include class action waivers, the plaintiffs are seeking a preliminary ruling that would block Meta from completing the layoffs, using existing federal- and state-level discrimination laws.
“These claims lack merit and are not based on facts,” a Meta spokesperson told Fast Company. “Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI.”
Earlier this year, Meta announced it would track employee keystrokes to train AI, but paused the program in June after an internal leak exposed employee data. The tracking program gained opposition from employees, who created and signed a petition calling upon Meta to stop collecting employee data to train AI models.
Between the mass layoffs and internal tracking, tension has been mounting at Meta. In June, the company’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth, said staff morale was near the “worst it’s ever been.”
