Meta is facing a legal fight in its own backyard as 26 former Bay Area employees head to federal court in Oakland, claiming the company leaned on artificial intelligence to help decide who got swept up in a spring round of layoffs. The lawsuit, filed Monday, says the systems disproportionately flagged workers who were pregnant, on medical leave or living with disabilities. The plaintiffs want a judge to hit pause on the separations and order an independent audit of the tools that fed the layoff lists.
As reported by Courthouse News, the 71-page complaint argues that managers did not carefully handpick who stayed and who left. Instead, it says, Meta relied on a cluster of internal systems, including a tool referred to as "Metamate," employee-trained "second-brain" agents, keystroke and activity monitoring data, AI-token-usage dashboards and algorithmic performance rankings that allegedly scored, ranked and ultimately selected employees for termination.
The suit details individual stories and says the scoring system "in effect penalized the employees for exercising their legal rights to these leaves," naming workers across six states who had taken or requested protected leave. The filing seeks injunctive and declaratory relief, along with damages, and is available in full at Courthouse News.
Meta announced in May that it planned to cut roughly 8,000 roles worldwide while restructuring around artificial intelligence and shifting thousands of workers into new AI-focused teams, according to the Los Angeles Times. Closer to home,
According to the plaintiffs, Meta built its layoff-related AI tools by tapping into a broad employee-tracking program. Internal reporting described that program as logging details such as keystrokes, mouse movements and on-screen content. In June, WIRED reported that Meta had paused a controversial tracking initiative after an internal exposure raised concerns about how those logs were stored and who could access them.
Legal Stakes And Remedies Sought
The lawsuit claims Meta violated several federal protections, including the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, along with state leave laws and California rules governing automated-decision systems. As Courthouse News explains, the workers are asking the court to preserve their employment status while an independent audit and individual arbitrations play out, arguing that financial payouts alone cannot fix the damage once layoffs are finalized.
Meta is rejecting the core premise of the case. A company spokesperson said the claims "lack merit and that workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI," according to Investing.com, which carried the statement from Reuters coverage. Attorneys for the former employees have asked the court to move quickly on their emergency requests, while Meta's legal team has not gone beyond the public statement.
Case records identify the lawsuit as Case No. 4:26-cv-07122, filed July 13 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Oakland Division. The court is set to weigh initial requests to block final separations while the dispute over the AI-assisted selection process plays out. Hearing schedules and any timeline for an independent audit have not yet been established.
