Meta used artificial intelligence systems that failed to account for disabilities or legally protected medical or family leave when deciding which employees to let go in a recent round of layoffs, according to a recent lawsuit. The lawsuit against Meta Platforms Inc. appears to be the first filed against a major U.S. company that is related to the use of AI in performance-based layoffs.
Despite record revenue, the plaintiffs claim that Meta began a 10% workforce reduction (roughly 8,000 employees) in May of 2026, based on employee lists generated by a “constellation” of internal AI systems rather than on management's judgment. The lawsuit against Meta was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by 26 current and former employees.
The employees contend that they were selected for downsizing within 24 months of taking or requesting legally protected leave or seeking reasonable accommodation for a disability. The plaintiffs are not named in the suit and are referred to as Doe 1 through 26.
The plaintiffs allege that the AI tools Meta used to assess employees in the mass layoff relied on performance ratings, productivity metrics, AI token consumption, and other activity-monitoring data to decide which employees should be let go. However, they argued that none of the metrics used for the job cuts can be accumulated by employees who are on legally protected family or medical leave or whose output is limited by a disability.
The lawsuit claims the employees were protected by federal laws, including the Family and Medical Leave Act, Pregnancy Discrimination Act, and Americans with Disabilities Act. It also alleges Meta’s actions violated state laws in California, Illinois, Washington, New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, and the District of Columbia.
AI Systems Aided in Selecting Employees for Termination
The plaintiffs allege that Meta used a number of internal AI systems and selected the lowest performers to be included on its termination list. However, they claim that at least some of the systems did not appear to account for time where employees were on legally protected leave. Those systems included:
- An internal large-language model assistant known as “Metamate”
- “Second brain” agents that use an employee’s communications and documentation to replicate their output
- Algorithmic productivity scoring that used keystrokes, screen monitoring, mouse use, browser history, messaging and email data continuously captured from Meta-issued devices
- Internal dashboards that displayed the consumption of AI tokens by employees
- AI-assisted performance-review tools that have largely supplanted the manager-driven review process
The lawsuit claims Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg told staff that performance reviews would look at how much employees used AI for their job. The company implemented an AI-assisted program for assessing employee performance that was known as “Checkpoint” that used employee AI adoption as its primary metric.
However, Checkpoint did not account for employees who were not using AI because they were on leave, the suit alleges. Numerous employees reported that their Checkpoint scores dropped dramatically after they returned from vacation or protected leave because the system did not account for their excused absences.
Lawsuit Seeks Injunction, Not Damages
Meta conditions employment based on a mutual arbitration agreement that allows courts to decide claims for injunctive relief. Therefore, the current and former employees are seeking a preliminary injunction preventing Meta from finalizing their separation until an independent audit of the separation process is concluded and their individual claims have been resolved in arbitration.
The audit proposed in the lawsuit would “examine the inputs, weights, and outputs of the selection process; determine whether protected-leave status, accommodation status, or any proxy was used as an input; recompute selection scores using leave- and accommodation-neutralized inputs; and identify any named Plaintiff whose selection cannot be justified on leave- and accommodation-neutral grounds.”
