26 Former Meta Workers Sue, Saying AI Ranked Them Out of a Job While They Were on Leave
A lawsuit filed this month claims Meta's internal AI tools scored employees on performance metrics that never accounted for parental or medical leave, making those workers more likely to be cut.
Key points
- 26 former Meta employees filed a lawsuit in July 2026 alleging AI tools unfairly selected them for layoffs.
- The May 2026 layoffs cut roughly 8,000 workers, about 10 percent of Meta's total staff.
- Plaintiffs claim an internal AI assistant called Metamate and related tools scored and ranked workers for termination.
- The lawsuit alleges federal and state laws protecting workers on medical or parental leave were violated.
- Meta says the claims lack merit and that humans, not AI, made all workforce decisions.
Meta laid off around 8,000 people in May 2026, roughly 10 percent of the company's entire workforce. For most of those workers, the cut came as a shock. For at least 26 of them, the shock turned into a lawsuit.
The former employees allege Meta used a cluster of internal AI tools, including an AI assistant called Metamate, employee-trained AI agents (software that can carry out multi-step tasks on its own), and internal dashboards that tracked how much each worker used AI, to score and rank staff for termination. The problem, they say, is simple: the system never filtered out people who were on parental or medical leave when their performance data was collected.
Take a few weeks off for surgery or a new baby, and the tools still measured your output. Less output meant a lower score. A lower score meant your name moved up the termination list.
"The result was that employees who took protected leaves were disproportionately selected for layoff," the lawsuit states, "based on scoring that not only failed to account for their protected leaves, but in effect penalized the employees for exercising their legal rights."
Protected leave is exactly what it sounds like: time off that federal and most state laws say your employer cannot punish you for taking. The lawsuit accuses Meta of doing exactly that, just with an algorithm doing the punishing instead of a manager.
Should employees elsewhere worry about this?
Yes, and not just at Meta. This case is one of the first to test whether using AI to make layoff decisions still counts as illegal discrimination when the bias is baked into the data rather than a person's intent. If courts agree with the plaintiffs, companies across every industry may need to audit how their performance tools handle workers who are away.
Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton, first quoted by The Verge AI, pushed back firmly. "These claims lack merit and are not based on facts," Clayton said. "Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI."
That defence matters. Courts will likely spend time deciding whether a human manager who signs off on an AI-generated list still counts as the decision-maker, or whether the list itself did the deciding.
The survival bias worth naming here: these 26 workers had the resources and will to sue. Many more in similar situations may not.
The one practical thing to do right now: if your employer uses any AI performance tool, ask HR in writing how that tool handles periods when you are on approved leave. A written answer creates a paper trail that protects you later.
