A lawsuit says Meta ranked layoff candidates partly on AI token use, a number no one on medical leave can accumulate.

Twenty-six current and former Meta employees filed suit in the Northern District of California on July 13, 2026, alleging the company used a constellation of internal AI systems to score, rank, and select workers for its layoff of roughly 8,000 people, and that the system disproportionately swept up workers with disabilities and those who had taken medical, pregnancy, or family leave. According to the 71-page complaint, the termination list was not assembled through the judgment of managers who knew the work. It drew on inputs including productivity scores, algorithmic performance rankings, and AI token consumption, metrics the plaintiffs argue by design cannot be accumulated by someone on protected leave or whose output is reduced by a disability, and the system was not paused for individualized, leave-aware review. Meta says the claims lack merit and states that workforce and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI. The plaintiffs seek to halt the separations, set to begin July 22, arguing the harms are irreversible once final, lost health coverage during pregnancy and treatment, extinguished leave rights, forfeited equity, and triggered immigration consequences.

Why this matters. The alleged failure is a proxy metric that measures the wrong thing. Token consumption stands in for value, and it structurally cannot be earned by a person exercising a legal right to leave, so the metric encodes the discrimination rather than committing it openly. That is a corpus-and-design failure of the kind AVAAS bias and demographic-disparity testing targets, and proxy-metric integrity is a named condition in the AVAAS methodology precisely because a system handed a measurable target that diverges from the actual goal will optimize the number. The plaintiffs also allege Meta did not test the systems for bias as required. Whether or not the court agrees, an independent evaluation on the record before deployment is the difference between a defensible adoption and this filing. The irreversibility the plaintiffs invoke is the same property the Irreversibility Index scores.