Meta has denied allegations that AI technology was responsible for deciding which employees were laid off during the company's recent workforce reduction. According to the firm, managers and not AI technology were behind all workforce decisions following the filing of a lawsuit by 26 current and former employees accusing the company of using biased AI during its layoff process.
According to the complaint filed at a federal court in Oakland, California, the social networking giant is being accused of discriminating against workers through biased use of AI technology during a layoff that occurred in May 2026 when 8,000 jobs were cut.
As per the complaint, Meta used internally developed AI-enabled tools and performance tracking dashboards that measured the productivity, communication, activity, and AI-token utilization of employees. As per the employees, these tools did not take into consideration the authorized medical, parental, disability, or family leave of the employees, which led to low performance scores of such employees.
The plaintiffs allege that this was a discriminatory process, which affected employees with disabilities, medical problems, or caregiver roles in their families.
Meta has firmly rejected the allegations. A company spokesperson said, “ Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI. The company maintains that managers reviewed organizational needs and made the final layoff decisions independently of automated systems.”
Meta has not disclosed details about how AI tools were used to evaluate employees, but the firm claims that the allegations misrepresent its decision-making process.
The workers seek judicial intervention that would halt any layoffs until the case is heard by arbitration. The reason is that losing their jobs now would mean that the workers will not have health insurance, money, and, for some, their legal immigration status in the United States.
Legal analysts believe that this case may prove to be one of the first important litigations against the use of AI technology at workplaces and the possible discrimination suits faced by businesses as a result of it.
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