Twenty-six Meta employees just filed what could become one of the most consequential employment lawsuits of the decade. Their claim: the company used a web of internal AI systems to decide who gets fired, and those systems had a nasty habit of targeting people who took medical, parental, or disability leave.
The federal lawsuit, filed on July 14 in US District Court for the Northern District of California in Oakland, alleges that Meta deployed what plaintiffs describe as a “constellation of internal artificial intelligence systems” to systematically identify workers for mass layoffs. Every single plaintiff had taken or requested protected leave within the prior 24 months.
What the AI allegedly did
The plaintiffs claim Meta’s AI tools relied on productivity scores, keystroke monitoring, and algorithmically assisted performance rankings to flag employees for termination. The machines were watching how fast you type, how much output you produce, and then ranking you against your peers.
The obvious problem? If you took three months of parental leave or were recovering from surgery, your productivity metrics are going to look pretty thin compared to someone who worked every single day. The AI, according to the lawsuit, didn’t adequately account for that.
