26 Meta employees sued the social media giant over allegations that the Californian company used artificial intelligence systems to deliberately fire employees on vacation due to illness or family reasons.
The lawsuit, filed this week in federal court in California, accuses Meta of using AI that includes performance rankings and other metrics that do not exclude workers on furlough or disability.
“The result was that employees who used protected leave were disproportionately selected for layoffs based on an evaluation that not only failed to take their protected leave into account, but effectively penalized employees for exercising their legal rights to that leave,” the lawsuit says.
Meta laid off nearly 8,000 employees in May, or about 10% of its global workforce, as the company sought to offset the cost of AI investments. By allegedly targeting specific workers, the company violated federal and state laws protecting pregnant, disabled or furloughed workers, the lawsuit says.
Meta denied the allegations.
“These claims are baseless and not based on facts,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “Human resource management and organizational decisions were and are made by humans, not by AI.”
The novel claims are the latest example of courts facing new legal questions as concerns about artificial intelligence grow.
According to the more than 70-page lawsuit, Meta used AI to monitor an employee’s keystrokes and activities, leading to backlash from workers. The company also required its employees to train a personal AI agent called a “second brain,” the lawsuit says.
“At least some senior executives trained second-brain agents prior to vacations, including maternity leave, so that Meta could continue to rely on the employee’s performance during the absence,” the lawsuit says.
The workers, who remain anonymous in the lawsuit, are current and former Meta employees from California, New York, Washington and other states.
A California employee who was a manager at Meta for about four years received good performance reviews, but took authorized leave in different years due to a death, a medical condition and a pregnancy. She submitted her intention to take maternity leave in April and learned weeks later that she would be fired, the lawsuit says.
Other California Meta workers who were laid off included those on paternity and medical leave who were unable to work, the lawsuit said.
Some workers on sick leave say they received poorer performance reviews before losing their jobs.
The damage allegedly caused to employees “cannot be remedied through monetary damages alone,” the lawsuit said.
“Meta takes away the entire purpose of protected leave – to relax, care for family, and have protected time off from work to do so,” the lawsuit says.
The workers are seeking a court order that would prevent Meta from firing them and changing their pay and benefits pending resolution of their legal rights pending an “independent review of the algorithmically assisted selection process,” the lawsuit says.
Other tech companies, including Amazon, Oracle and Microsoft, have carried out mass layoffs this year.
According to global outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, U.S. tech employers announced 139,156 layoffs from January to June, up 83% from the same period in 2025.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-07-16/meta-accused-of-using-ai-to-pick-employees-with-medical-conditions-for-layoffs
