meta's defense against the AI layoff lawsuit is that humans made the decisions

The lawsuit is about an AI system a human designed. Meta’s defense: humans made the decisions.

In May, Meta cut 8,000 employees — roughly 10% of its workforce — tracked via Metamate (their internal LLM), keystroke monitoring, token-usage dashboards, and algorithmic performance scores. On Tuesday, 26 of those employees filed in federal court in Oakland. They’re still on payroll; separations begin July 22. Their argument is two words: “by design.”

As in: scores “by design, cannot be accumulated by an employee who is on protected medical or family leave, or whose output is reduced by a disability.” Not a bug. A design decision.

Meta’s response: “Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI.”

Meta’s not wrong. A person designed a system where protected leave earns zero data points and called the output objective. A person decided those scores would determine who got cut. Metamate didn’t write its own spec.

You deploy AI scoring to remove the human bias fingerprints from HR. The scoring codifies the bias into architecture.

One employee was allegedly warned by a manager that taking medical leave would get him laid off. He took it. The AI gave him zero points. The manager was right.

Meta’s right that people made these decisions. That’s what “by design” means.