Ex-employees say Meta’s AI secretly drove mass layoffs — Meta insists humans were in charge

• Early 2026: Meta’s AI push and monitoring tools
• May layoffs: 8,000 jobs cut
• Plaintiffs’ claims: protected leave became a liability
• Meta’s response: ‘People, not AI’ made the calls

Ex-employees say Meta’s AI secretly drove mass layoffs — Meta insists humans were in charge
A new lawsuit against Meta has opened a high‑stakes fight over who really decided which workers lost their jobs: human managers or the company’s own artificial intelligence systems.

§Early 2026: Meta’s AI push and monitoring tools

As Meta ramped up its internal AI initiatives, it rolled out a “constellation” of tools that monitored work output, software activity, and usage of in‑house AI assistants like its chatbot Metamate and employee‑trained “second‑brain” agents. Internal dashboards reportedly classified staff by how deeply they embraced AI, using categories such as “AI Native,” “AI First,” and “AI Enabled.”

According to the complaint, Meta also tracked keystrokes and mouse movements on many US employees’ computers, feeding that data into AI models and adoption leaderboards, while pressing workers to use AI tools more heavily.

§May layoffs: 8,000 jobs cut

In May, Meta cut roughly 8,000 jobs—about 10 percent of its staff—as part of a major restructuring. The lawsuit filed by 26 current and former employees alleges that, behind the scenes, AI‑assisted ranking systems “score[d], rank[ed], and select[ed] employees for inclusion on the termination list,” rather than relying on “the considered judgment of managers who knew the work.”

§Plaintiffs’ claims: protected leave became a liability

The plaintiffs say the AI‑driven metrics effectively counted protected medical, parental, and disability leave as underperformance, because workers on leave could not accumulate performance scores, output data, or AI‑usage tokens. As a result, employees who exercised their legal rights to take leave were “disproportionately selected for layoff,” in a process they argue violated federal and state protections against terminating workers for taking protected leave.

§Meta’s response: ‘People, not AI’ made the calls

Meta has firmly rejected the allegations. In statements to multiple outlets, the company said “workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI,” and described the claims as lacking merit and “not based on facts.”

The case, believed to be the first against a major US company over alleged AI‑driven layoffs, now heads to federal court in Northern California, where judges will have to untangle how much power Meta’s AI tools really had over who stayed and who was let go.

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