Imagine losing your job and never finding out who decided it. Twenty six former Meta employees say that's what happened to them: a layoff of 8,000 people, sorted by a stack of company software that scored them on things like output metrics, keystroke and activity tracking, and how much they used the company's AI tools. Every one of those 26 had recently taken medical or family leave, or asked for a disability accommodation. If you're out on leave, you can't rack up any of those numbers, so the system read your absence as failure. One scientist was flagged for termination while she was on approved leave waiting to give birth. She was on the list the day before her water broke.
Here's why that's a big deal: Meta's answer is that people made these calls, not AI. But when nobody can show a single record of a person actually weighing your work, "a human signed off" is just a sentence somebody wrote down after the fact. A signature with nothing behind it isn't oversight, it's a costume. That's why the workers are asking a judge to force an outside expert to open the software up and look at what went in, what it counted as important, and what came out. Reuters says it's the first case like it against a major American company, and every employer letting software pick who goes is watching it.