Twenty-six former Meta employees filed a lawsuit accusing the company of using AI-powered software that disproportionately selected workers with disabilities or medical leave histories for mass layoffs, Reuters reported on July 14th. The complaint says the system analyzed personnel data and helped identify people for termination in ways that punished health conditions protected by employment law. Meta has denied wrongdoing and said its layoff process complied with the law. The case remains an allegation, but its object is precise enough to be disturbing: a workplace decision system reading bodies through absences, accommodations, diagnoses, and leave records.

The medical layoff turns the employee file into a second body. A person may appear in the office through performance reviews, logins, project notes, benefits records, manager comments, and medical exceptions. When those fragments enter a selection tool, illness can become a pattern before it becomes a legal category. The worker may never see the model, the weights, the proxy variables, or the spreadsheet where vulnerability was translated into risk. Corporate restructuring already hides violence behind percentages and business units. AI adds another layer of distance. The badge stops working, and the explanation arrives later as policy, efficiency, or an allegedly neutral score that learned too much from the private cost of staying employed.