Meta has officially denied allegations that it used artificial intelligence to determine which employees would be laid off during its May 2026 restructuring, which eliminated about 8,000 jobs—roughly 10% of its global workforce. The company insists that human managers made all workforce decisions, and that AI only supported administrative processes.
The denial comes in response to a lawsuit filed on July 14 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California by 26 current and former employees. The plaintiffs accuse Meta of using an internal AI system called Metamate—a large language model trained on employee communications and documents—alongside algorithmic productivity scores derived from keystroke activity, browser history, email data, and AI token consumption. They claim this system scored, ranked, and selected workers for termination in a way that disproportionately targeted people on medical, maternity, or parental leave.
Nearly half of the plaintiffs say their termination directly followed protected leave. The complaint argues that the scoring framework failed to account for time spent on legally protected leave, effectively penalizing employees for reduced output during periods when they were legally entitled to be away. “Meta did not assemble the termination list through the considered judgment of managers who knew the work,” the complaint states.
Meta’s spokesperson told CNBC that the claims “lack merit and are not based on facts,” maintaining that human judgment drove all workforce decisions. The plaintiffs are now seeking a preliminary court ruling to block Meta from completing the layoffs on July 22 while they pursue their claims in private arbitration, as required by their employment contracts.
Legal analysts note that a human manager signing off on an algorithm’s output does not automatically insulate a company from discrimination claims if the underlying scoring criteria were discriminatory. This lawsuit arrives just weeks after a federal judge in California ruled that Workday must face similar claims that its AI-powered job-screening services allegedly violate anti-discrimination laws.
This case is the first of its kind against a major US company regarding AI-selected layoffs. Its outcome could shape how courts evaluate the use of AI in workforce decisions, what disclosure obligations employers carry when algorithmic tools inform layoffs, and whether “a human approved it” constitutes sufficient oversight when the scoring methodology was built without legal-leave exemptions. For the broader tech industry, which has rapidly adopted AI-driven performance tools, the case represents an early signal of legal and regulatory exposure.