Meta's spring layoffs may have been decided by software, not supervisors.
A complaint filed by 26 anonymous plaintiffs in US District Court for the Northern District of California alleges that Meta used a suite of internal AI tools — including a system called "Metamate," employee-trained "second-brain" agents, and keystroke-monitoring software — to score and rank workers before selecting them for termination. Employees were graded partly on how heavily they used Meta's own AI products, with internal dashboards sorting workers into tiers labeled "AI Native," "AI First," and "AI Enabled." The suit claims the resulting list disproportionately hit workers with disabilities and employees who had taken protected medical or family leave.
The legal theory here matters beyond the headline number of 8,000 cuts. If a company delegates a reduction-in-force to an algorithm, it may still be liable for that algorithm's disparate impact on protected classes — and "the machine decided" is not a recognized legal defense. This case could force courts to define what "considered judgment" means when the judgment belongs to a model.
Meta is hardly alone in using AI to evaluate employees, but few companies have left a paper trail this specific: named internal tools, named scoring categories, named dashboards. That specificity is either the plaintiffs' strongest asset or a sign the lawsuit was filed before full discovery could pressure-test the claims.