A group of 26 current and former Meta employees filed a lawsuit in the Northern District of California alleging that the company used artificial intelligence systems in its May 2026 layoff round in a way that discriminated against workers on medical, maternity, paternity, or disability leave.
The plaintiffs were part of the 10% of Meta's workforce that was cut in May, a round that Mark Zuckerberg himself announced with an internal memo stating that "success is not guaranteed." The lawsuit alleges that Meta employed a constellation of internal artificial intelligence systems to determine which employees to include in the cuts, and that these tools used metrics that, by design, could not be accumulated by people on approved leave or whose performance was reduced by a medical condition.
The questioned indicators include performance ratings, calibration scores, productivity metrics, "AI-native" ratings, and AI token consumption, a variable that has become a proxy for how actively an employee uses artificial intelligence tools in their daily work. The plaintiffs' lawyers argue that this type of metrics systematically penalizes those who were absent for legally protected reasons and that, therefore, the selection process violated leave protection laws and anti-discrimination acts related to pregnancy and disability.
The plaintiffs are seeking an injunction to maintain their employment status while an independent audit of the algorithm-assisted selection process is conducted and their claims are resolved in arbitration.
Meta responded through a spokesperson that "the claims are without merit and are not based on facts," and added that workforce and organizational management decisions were made by people, not by AI.
The case comes less than a month after a federal judge in California ruled against Workday in a separate lawsuit related to the use of AI in hiring processes, where the judge determined that the company must face accusations about its automated candidate selection tools and their possible discriminatory impact.
From next+'s perspective, this lawsuit signals a turning point in the relationship between artificial intelligence and talent management that HR and leadership teams need to incorporate into their decisions immediately. The use of AI-generated or AI-influenced metrics to evaluate performance and make layoff decisions is not illegal in itself, but when those metrics systematically penalize employees on legally protected leave, the system becomes a mechanism of unintentional discrimination with concrete legal consequences. The consumption of AI tokens as a productivity indicator is a precise example of how an apparently neutral metric can be biased by definition: someone on medical leave cannot accumulate it, regardless of their historical performance level. For organizations that are incorporating AI into evaluation processes, performance management, or workforce decisions, the Meta case is not just a legal alert, it is a sign that algorithmic biases become legal liabilities when applied to decisions that affect protected labor rights.