Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, is seen at the US Capitol after a meeting at the office of Senate Majority Leader John Thune, RS.D., March 26, 2026.
Tom Williams CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
Current and former alliance Meta employees have sued the social media giant, saying the company used artificial intelligence in its latest round of discriminatory layoffs.
In the lawsuit filed Monday, the plaintiffs allege that Meta violated various protected leave laws and discriminatory practices related to pregnancy and disability, among others, and said they wish to pursue their individual claims in the settlement.
Attorneys representing 26 unnamed workers said in a legal complaint filed in the United States Northern District Court of California that the plaintiffs were among 10% of Meta’s workforce cut in the company’s round of layoffs in May.
The plaintiffs allege that Meta’s “constellation of internal artificial intelligence systems” failed to take authorized absences into account when deciding which employees to cut.
“Those tools use inputs—performance measures, measurement points, productivity and output metrics, ‘AI-native’ metrics, and the use of AI tokens—that, by design, cannot be collected by an employee on medical or protected family leave, or whose output is reduced due to a disability,” the lawyers wrote in the filing.
The lawsuit accuses Meta of using metrics like token usage, which has become a proxy for the general use of AI, in a way that targets certain employees.
Courthouse News Service previously reported the case.
A spokesperson for Meta told CNBC in an email that the “claims are baseless and unsubstantiated.”
“Human resource management and organizational decisions are made and implemented by humans, not AI,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.
The case underscores growing concerns about the impact of AI on jobs and people with disabilities in the workplace.
The plaintiffs are asking the court to issue a “preliminary order maintaining their employment status” at Meta, “pending an independent evaluation of the algorithmically assisted selection process and resolution of the merits of their claims in arbitration.”
The lawsuit comes about a month after a federal judge in California ruled against the tech company Work day in a separate work-related case involving the use of AI to make hiring decisions. In that case, a judge ruled that Workday must address complaints about the company’s use of AI job evaluation services that allegedly violated state and federal labor discrimination laws.
Workday denied the allegations and said in a statement at the time that its AI recruiting software does not make hiring decisions “in California or elsewhere.”
“Our technology only looks at job qualifications, not protected characteristics like race, age, or disability,” Workday said in a statement. “We rigorously test our products as part of our AI program to ensure that our tools do not harm protected groups.”
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