Meta Sued Over AI Layoffs Targeting Protected Leave

A group of 26 current and former Meta employees has filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the company’s artificial intelligence tools systematically disadvantaged workers who took protected medical, family or pregnancy leave during a major workforce reduction. The complaint, submitted this month in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, centers on Meta’s roughly 10 percent reduction in force that began in May.

According to insights tracked by like.tg, the plaintiffs argue that Meta relied on automated scoring systems rather than human managerial judgment to compile its termination lists. These systems, the suit claims, produced rankings that could not be fairly achieved by anyone who had been absent for legally protected reasons.

Specific Cases Cited in the Complaint

The lawsuit opens with concrete examples. One scientist was selected for layoff while still on pre-birth pregnancy leave. A manager who had already been demoted after returning from medical leave was then chosen for termination only weeks into a second medical leave. An engineer saw his performance rating lowered explicitly because of “broken time” caused by an injury that kept him offline.

These individual stories, the plaintiffs say, illustrate a broader pattern. Workers who had taken or requested protected leave in the two years preceding the cuts were “disproportionally” included on the reduction-in-force list.

How the AI Scoring Systems Operated

“Meta did not assemble the termination list through the considered judgment of managers who knew the work,” the complaint states. “Instead, Meta used a constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems … to score, rank, and select employees for inclusion on the list.”

The tools drew on a range of metrics: traditional performance ratings and calibration scores, productivity and output numbers, “AI-native” ratings, and even AI-token consumption. By design, the lawsuit notes, none of these data points can accumulate while an employee is on protected medical or family leave or while output is reduced by a disability.

Meta allegedly made no effort to neutralize or adjust those inputs for leave periods. Nor did the company exclude from consideration anyone who had recently exercised leave rights or sought disability accommodations. The result, according to the filing, was that employees who used their legal entitlements were effectively penalized in the ranking process.

Legal Claims Under Multiple Federal Statutes

The workers contend that this approach violated several cornerstone employment laws: the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By allowing AI systems to treat protected absences as negative signals, Meta is accused of discriminating against employees who exercised rights Congress explicitly created to protect them.

The full complaint is available via court document repository: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/28483451/us_dis_cand_3_26cv7122_d1123868e357_complaint_against_meta_platforms_inc_filing_fee_40.pdf.

Meta’s Response and Next Steps

A Meta spokesperson rejected the allegations, telling reporters that the claims “lack merit and are not based on facts.” The company insisted that “Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI.”

The plaintiffs are seeking a preliminary injunction that would stop Meta from finalizing the separations of the named workers while the case proceeds. If granted, the order would keep those employees on the payroll pending further court review of the AI-driven selection process.

like.tg will continue monitoring the litigation as it moves through the Northern District of California. The case raises broader questions about how large technology firms integrate automated ranking tools into high-stakes employment decisions and whether those tools can be designed to respect long-standing leave protections. For now, the 26 workers maintain that Meta’s systems did not merely overlook protected leave—they actively scored it as a liability.