Ex-Meta staff sue, claim AI layoff tools penalized parental leave

Meta didn’t just use AI to trim its workforce — it allegedly let those tools penalize employees for being on leave. A new lawsuit from 26 former staffers, first reported by Reuters, claims the company’s internal performance-ranking systems failed to exclude workers on protected medical or parental leave when drawing up termination lists. The result, according to the suit: people who took legally protected time off were disproportionately shown the door.

The complaint describes a “constellation” of internal AI tools, including an assistant called Metamate and employee-trained AI agents, that scored and ranked staff. Dashboards tracked AI token usage, building a data picture that supposedly guided who got cut. The plaintiffs aren’t arguing AI made the final call — they’re arguing the scoring system baked in a bias that human decision-makers then rubber-stamped. The layoffs in question hit in May, part of Meta’s plan to slash roughly 8,000 jobs, or 10 percent of its workforce.

Meta’s response is blunt. Spokesperson Tracy Clayton told The Verge the claims “lack merit and are not based on facts,” insisting that “workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI.” It’s a clean, hard line: the machines didn’t fire you, managers did. But that defense sidesteps the central allegation — that the data those managers relied on was already tainted by algorithms that couldn’t tell the difference between slacking off and recovering from surgery.

Here’s where it gets legally interesting. Federal and state laws are clear that employers can’t terminate workers for taking protected leave. The suit doesn’t need to prove Meta intentionally targeted parents and sick employees. It just needs to show the company used a ranking system that had that effect and didn’t fix it. If discovery reveals internal dashboards flagging leave-takers as low performers, Clayton’s statement won’t age well. For now, 26 former employees are betting a judge will want to peek under the hood of those AI tools — and Meta will have to decide how much of that code it’s willing to show.