Twenty-six former Meta employees have filed a lawsuit accusing the company of using artificial intelligence systems that unfairly targeted workers on medical leave during a round of layoffs. The plaintiffs, all let go in Meta’s May 2025 cuts that eliminated about 8,000 roles, argue that a suite of internal AI tools—including an assistant called Metamate, employee-trained “second brain” agents, and dashboards tracking AI token usage, keystrokes, and mouse movements—were used to rank staff for termination. The lawsuit claims these systems penalized people who were on family or medical leave, or who had disabilities, because they couldn’t generate enough AI tokens or engage with the tools in the same way as their peers.

Meta pushed back, telling Reuters that human managers always made the final call. “Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI,” a company spokesperson said. Yet the former employees argue that the AI-driven rankings directly influenced who got cut, and that the system’s design failed to account for legally protected absences. Each plaintiff had taken, requested, or been approved for protected leave—under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act or California’s equivalent—within two years of being laid off. Both laws prohibit employers from factoring such leave into termination decisions.

The lawsuit seeks to block Meta from completing its layoffs until an independent audit reviews the AI-assisted selection process. Because of Meta’s employment contracts, the plaintiffs plan to pursue their claims in arbitration. The case also echoes earlier concerns about Meta’s data practices: in April 2025, Reuters reported that the company had been recording employees’ keystrokes and mouse movements to train AI, a program it paused after private chats became visible to other staff. The idea that similar surveillance data may have influenced layoffs adds a new layer to an already contentious saga.

Source: Engadget