Meta Accused: Biased AI Drove Mass Layoffs

Meta is facing legal action from over two dozen former employees who allege the tech giant utilized artificial intelligence to assess worker performance, but critically failed to exempt individuals on protected medical or parental leave from this evaluation system.

A lawsuit, initially reported by Reuters, has been filed by 26 former Meta staff members. They contend that the company employed AI-powered tools to unfairly target employees on leave for dismissal during recent layoffs. The core of the complaint states that Meta relied on performance data gathered by a "constellation" of internal AI systems to identify workers for termination, yet neglected to exclude those on protected leave from its ranking methodology.

The lawsuit explicitly details the alleged consequence: "The result was that employees who took protected leaves were disproportionately selected for layoff, based on scoring that not only failed to account for their protected leaves, but in effect penalized the employees for exercising their legal rights to these leaves."

These disputed layoffs took place in May, forming part of Meta's broader strategy to reduce its workforce by 10 percent, impacting approximately 8,000 employees. The former employees claim Meta leveraged various AI assets, including an internal AI assistant named Metamate, employee-trained AI agents, and internal dashboards displaying AI token usage, among other instruments, to "score, rank, and select employees for inclusion on the termination list."

The legal complaint asserts that Meta's actions constitute a violation of both federal and state laws that prohibit employers from terminating staff for exercising their right to protected leave. Responding to these allegations, Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton told The Verge, "These claims lack merit and are not based on facts." Clayton further emphasized, "Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI."