A group of current and former Meta employees have sued the company, alleging that an AI system used during recent job cuts discriminated against workers on sick leave, maternity leave or protected carer leave.
The lawsuit, reported on Tuesday by US outlets Courthouse News Service and CNBC, was filed on Monday in a federal court in northern California.
It involves 26 claimants who say Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, used an internal AI system known as “Metamate” to help decide who would be laid off.
According to the complaint, the system was used as part of a workforce reduction launched in May in which Meta cut about 10% of its staff, or roughly 8,000 jobs.
The claimants say the system assessed employees using factors such as productivity and their use of AI tokens in their work.
They argue that such measures unfairly disadvantaged people who were absent from work because of illness, maternity leave or protected responsibilities as carers.
The lawsuit states that employees on protected leave were selected for redundancy at a disproportionate rate because the scoring system failed to take their leave into account and, in practice, penalised them for exercising their legal rights.
Meta has denied the allegations. A company spokesperson told CNBC that organisational decisions “were and are made by people, not AI”.
