A coalition of current and former Meta employees have sued the social media giant, alleging that the company used artificial intelligence in its latest round of layoffs in a way that was discriminatory.

In a lawsuit filed Monday, plaintiffs allege that Meta violated various protected-leave laws and discrimination acts related to pregnancies and disabilities, among others, and said they wish to pursue their claims individually in arbitration.

Attorneys representing the 26 unnamed workers said in a legal complaint filed in the United States Northern District Court of California that the plaintiffs were among the 10% of Meta’s workforce cut in the company’s May layoff round.

The plaintiffs allege that Meta’s “constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems” failed to take approved absences into account when determining which employees to cut.

“Those tools draw on inputs—performance ratings, calibration scores, productivity and output metrics, ‘AI-native’ ratings, and AI-token consumption—that, by design, cannot be accumulated by an employee who is on protected medical or family leave, or whose output is reduced by a disability,” the lawyers wrote in the filing.

The lawsuit accuses Meta of using metrics such as token consumption, which has become a proxy for general AI usage, in a way that targeted certain employees.

Courthouse News Service previously reported the lawsuit.

A Meta spokesperson told CNBC in an email that the “claims lack merit and are not based on facts.”

“Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI,” the Meta spokesperson said in the statement.

The lawsuit underscores the rising anxiety about AI’s impact on jobs and people with disabilities in the workforce.

The plaintiffs are asking the court to issue a “preliminary injunction maintaining the status quo of their employment” at Meta, “pending an independent audit of the algorithmically assisted selection process and resolution of the merits of their claims in arbitration.”

The lawsuit comes nearly a month after a federal judge in California ruled against tech firm Workday in a separate employee-related lawsuit involving the use of AI for hiring decisions. In that case, the judge ruled that Workday must face claims about the company’s use of AI-powered job screening services that allegedly violated state and federal laws pertaining to employee discrimination.

Workday denied the allegations and said in a statement at the time that the AI recruiting software doesn’t conduct hiring decisions “in California or anywhere else.”

“Our technology looks only at job qualifications, not protected traits like race, age, ​or disability,” Workday said in the statement. “We rigorously ​test our products as part ⁠of our Responsible AI program to confirm…

A majority of U.S. employees now want to hold corporations more accountable via an AI sovereign wealth fund, amid dissatisfaction over a growing number of tech layoffs despite higher overall corporate profits, according to a recent poll.

The national survey of 1,690 adults by research firm Verasight, which was carried out in June and published earlier this month, suggests that 69% of Americans now support “forcing” AI firms to transfer 50% of their stock to a public sovereign wealth fund.

“In the eyes of the public, AI Sovereign funds are seen as a tool to distribute the gains from the AI industry back to broader society,” said Benjamin Leff, chief executive officer of Verasight.

In June, Senator Bernie Sanders proposed the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act which, if passed, would give the public a 50% stake in the largest AI companies in the U.S.

“It would guarantee that the economic benefits generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us — not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer,” Sanders said in a statement last month.

“The future of AI and the fate of humanity must not be decided behind closed doors in Silicon Valley by billionaires seeking to maximize their power and profit,” Sanders said.

The rising number of tech layoffs in the U.S. have left many workers frustrated and worried over job security, as corporations continue to ramp up capital expenditure for AI expansion.

Goldman Sachs Senior Global Economist Joseph Briggs estimates that more than 9% of the labor force, or around 15 million workers, could lose their jobs during a 10-year AI transition period, the bank said in a report published last month.

This “would be the type of automation and reallocation shock that we saw in the late ’90s and early 2000s and in other periods of significant technological change,” Briggs said.

“But [Briggs] believes these losses will prove temporary owing to his expectation that AI will create many new jobs over the long term even as it destroys existing ones,” the Goldman Sachs report says.

Sovereign wealth funds can serve in multiple roles when it comes to AI. They can lead development of AI at a national level by funding capital-intensive AI infrastructure, take equity stakes in AI companies and capture a share of AI-driven economic gains for the public treasury, according to research firm Windfall Trust.

However, sovereign wealth funds could also face challenges in managing between the public good and the global race to build AI capabilities.

“There is also a tension between the financial mandate (maximize returns for citizens) and the strategic mandate (build national AI capacity, maintain influence over frontier systems), since these objectives can conflict when the best financial investment is a foreign AI company rather than a…

On an early morning in January, Jake Linsley woke up to a text from Amazon that was lighting up his phone.

“I thought it was saying, ‘Your package is delayed,'” Linsley said in an interview. “I read it again and was like, ‘Holy s—, I got fired.'”

Linsley, who worked as a finance manager at Amazon for nearly six years, was one of roughly 16,000 employees swept up in the company’s mass layoffs in late January. Combined with the more than 14,000 staffers let go three months earlier, it marked the steepest cuts in Amazon’s history.

As an Amazon employee, Linsley was part of an American corporate elite: working for a tech giant with opportunities for growth, promotion, high salaries and enviable perks. But he and the other laid-off workers suddenly entered the harsh reality of a job market being rapidly reshaped by artificial intelligence — and competing with hordes of others who had been let go b Meta, Salesforce and Cisco. In some cases, the jobs they’d been hired to do simply don’t exist anymore. And the tech giants continue to cut roles in part to fund the hundreds of billions of dollars they’re investing in AI.

The tech sector has laid off roughly 140,000 employees in the U.S. so far this year, more than any other industry, according to consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. In May, layoffs across the industry reached their highest for any month since August 2024, before easing in June.

AI was the main reason companies gave for the cuts for a fourth straight month, Challenger said in a report last week. The firm said AI has been cited in about 23% of all job cut announcements in 2026.

“Tech remains the epicenter of this year’s cuts,” Challenger said. “AI is the dominant force as companies are restructuring around it, automating roles and reallocating budgets toward new capabilities. The sector is being reshaped in real time.”

Amazon has been downsizing more aggressively than many of its peers, laying off more than 57,000 staffers since 2022, or roughly 16% of its corporate workforce. According to data from the website Layoffs.fyi, Amazon has accounted for about 13% of the tech industry’s cuts this year.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has warned employees that AI “should change the way our work is done,” and that in the next few years, efficiency gains from the technology “will reduce our total corporate workforce.” The company has looked for ways to unwind its pandemic-era hiring binge and eliminate bureaucracy so that it can operate like “the world’s largest startup.”

CNBC spoke to more than a dozen people laid off by Amazon over the past eight-plus months about how they’ve navigated the job market at a time of swelling industry unemployment and, for many, a sense of diminishing opportunity.

While some have since landed roles at places like Apple or Salesforce, others are staring at hundreds of unanswered job applications and roles…

Lucid Group said Monday it is cutting its U.S. workforce by approximately 18% as part of a cost-savings plan.

The all-electric vehicle maker said its plan would give it annualized cost savings of approximately $158 million.

The company also said Monday that its chief operating officer, Marc Winterhoff, is leaving the company effective immediately. Winterhoff was interim CEO at the company until Silvio Napoli took over the top job on June 1. The role of COO has been eliminated, Lucid said.

Lucid’s workforce reductions include full-time employees, contractors and hourly production workers in manufacturing, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The automaker had about 9,000 employees globally as of Dec. 31.

“These are difficult decisions taken to align production with demand, reduce inventory, and adapt to declining market conditions,” a Lucid spokesperson said in a statement. “They are part of a broader effort to simplify the company, sharpen execution, and position Lucid to become more competitive over time.”

In February, Lucid laid off about 12% of its U.S. workforce in a push for profitability.

Lucid said Monday it expects to incur cash charges of approximately $32 million related to severance, employee benefits and employee transition associated with the latest cuts, according to its filing.

The automaker also said it would be eliminating the second shift of production at its AMP-1 factory in Arizona.

Lucid said last month that Napoli would be evaluating the company’s business operations. It suspended its guidance as a result, adding that it needs to lower its “elevated inventory” of vehicles, which for automakers has historically meant decreasing or idling vehicle production.

Lucid held its first investor day in nearly five years in March. It said at the time that it expects to be cash-flow positive by later this decade.

While Lucid has been able to increase sales and narrow losses, the company lost $2.7 billion on revenue of $1.35 billion in 2025. It had negative free cash flow of $3.8 billion last year, roughly 31% larger than the year earlier.

Lucid and its electric vehicle peers are increasingly facing a more challenging market than they did in recent years amid slower-than-expected adoption of EVs and changing regulations under the Trump administration, including the elimination of a $7,500 federal incentive for purchasing an EV.

— CNBC’s Michael Wayland contributed to this report.

Thoma Bravo’s billionaire founder says AI will transform junior workers’ roles by eliminating grunt work, despite growing concerns about the technology’s impact on entry-level roles.

Orlando Bravo, the founder of software-focused private equity firm Thoma Bravo, discussed how the role of junior associates is changing as the company increasingly utilizes AI, in a conversation with CNBC’s Annette Weisbach at the SuperReturn conference in Berlin on Tuesday.

The jobs of junior associates will become greater, and they’ll “mature a lot quicker,” Bravo said. “They’re spending a lot less time doing models or comparables than before…overall, now they really get into investing operations and a much bigger way of thinking about business.”

“I bother them a lot less, because at midnight I can do something really quickly with AI instead of [comparables], instead of calling them to do it in the middle of the night, which improves their life anyway, which is what they want,” he added.

The comments come amid growing concerns about youth unemployment, with recent data showing the number of young people not in education, employment or training in the U.K. increased to over a million in the first four months of the year.

Young people are facing an increasingly competitive job market in the U.S. and U.K. as companies lay off thousands of workers and deploy AI, resulting in a shrinking of entry-level jobs.

“For young people, AI is going to be amazing, and I’m very, very upset that some people say that it’ll destroy entry-level jobs,” Bravo said.

“If you define the role of an associate as just doing a spreadsheet, you don’t need that, but our associates are now calling on companies a lot more. They’re developing relationships with CEOs, and we need a lot more of them.”

Bravo explained that it’s the first time in his 30-year career in private equity where he has needed to hire more, as AI creates more work.

While some like Bravo are more bullish on AI’s capacity to create jobs, there have been a slew of AI layoffs in the past year, with the technology behind over 50,000 layoffs in the U.S. in 2025. Major firms like Salesforce, IBM, and Microsoft cited AI as a reason for job cuts.

Meta said in April that it plans to lay off about 10% of its workforce to offset major capex spending on AI infrastructure this year, which the tech giant said could reach up to $135 billion in 2026.

Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey’s Block laid off over 4,000 people, or over half of its workforce, saying it can operate more efficiently with a smaller team as AI automates more work.

As young people struggle to secure jobs, the U.K.’s technology secretary Liz Kendall said the government is focused on upskilling young workers on AI by providing free courses to help boost employment.

Entry-level workers with AI skills can command salaries up to…

A new spending discipline is taking hold inside corporate America, as chief financial officers and boards start cracking down on inefficient artificial intelligence spending. The change has the potential to reshape the AI trade.

For the past two years, the playbook has been to default to the most powerful AI model and direct all queries through it, regardless of complexity. Now, with AI bills running far ahead of budgets, companies are starting to ask whether every task actually needs the top or frontier models. Two leaders at the center of the AI buildout told CNBC this week that a solution is emerging: model routing.

The pressure behind the shift is a cost curve that has surprised even the biggest tech companies. Jeetu Patel, chief product officer at Cisco, laid out the math. At roughly $200 of token usage per employee per week, that’s about $10,000 a year per person. With 90,000 employees, a company is looking at $900 million annually. Tokens are blocks of data that models use to generate information. Usage is billed by the number of tokens processed.

Patel said Cisco came in well over its own budget and has had to adjust, with 30,000 engineers now building products written largely with AI. Cisco has reallocated resources, prioritizing tokens over other spending.

Amazon has unveiled its latest warehouse robot that can take commands in conversational language, underscoring how AI-powered automation is advancing as companies continue to slash their corporate workforce in AI-driven efficiencies.

The tech giant’s next-generation Proteus is an autonomous mobile robot, which is designed to understand natural language commands from workers and transport items in warehouses. It was launched at the company’s Delivering the Future event in London on Thursday.

The original Proteus was first deployed in Amazon fulfillment centers in 2022 to assist workers, including transporting heavy carts weighing up to 400 kilograms. It’s currently used in 25 fulfillment centers in the U.S., with the latest version of the robot set to be rolled out in Europe in the first half of 2027.

Workers will be able to direct the new Proteus in plain language, without technical commands or a programming interface. It’s part of a broader push to expand the technology in Europe, with Amazon also committing to investing 10 billion euros ($11.6 billion) to modernize fulfillment operations in the region over the next few years.

Other robotics advancements include its first robot with a sense of touch, Vulcan, and a robotic tote handling system called STARK.

The announcement comes as Amazon continues to push ahead with AI-driven layoffs, including cutting 14,000 corporate workers in October as it looks to invest further in the technology. It said it’s laying off a further 16,000 workers in January to reduce layers and bureaucracy.

CEO Andy Jassy told staff last year that AI will result in a shrinking of Amazon’s workforce over the coming years.

“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy said in a memo to employees. “It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce.”

Several tech giants, including Microsoft, Salesforce, and IBM, were behind thousands of AI layoffs in 2025, with the technology responsible for over 50,000 layoffs in the U.S. during the year. More recently, Block, Oracle, and Meta were among the firms carrying out job cuts.

“Since we’ve invested in robotics, we’ve created hundreds of thousands of jobs,” Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics told CNBC on Thursday.

Investments in people, upskilling, and smart machines create jobs, Brady said, adding that Amazon is creating jobs at a scale not seen in the U.S. in the past 10 years.

Amazon’s Country Manager for the U.K. and Ireland, John Boumphrey, told CNBC that its robotics investment actually…

SentinelOne shares sank 6% as the cybersecurity company laid off 8% of its full-time workforce to focus on artificial intelligence and data investments.

“This is not a reactive measure, it is a deliberate evolution to reduce complexity, raise the performance bar, and build a leaner, more agile SentinelOne,” CEO Tomer Weingarten told analysts on the earnings call Thursday.

Over the last few months, he said SentinelOne has restructured its teams and already seen “meaningful productivity” gains from ramped AI use.

In a securities filing, the company said it expects a one-time $25 million charge tied to the layoffs. The company had over 3,000 employees at the end of April.

Tech companies are increasingly slashing headcount as AI forces businesses to reallocate resources to keep pace with innovation. New AI tools are also allowing businesses to automate workloads.

Earlier this week, Israel-based web developer Wix slashed a fifth of its workforce due to AI and the strength of the Israeli shekel. Cisco downsized its headcount by nearly 5% earlier this month and Block roughly halved its workforce in February. Software firm Atlassian cut about 1,600 jobs in March.

SentinelOne’s workforce cuts also came alongside lackluster guidance for the current quarter and full year.

The company said it anticipates between $289 million and $291 million in revenue, versus the $292 million expected by LSEG analysts. SentinelOne reiterated its full-year outlook, expecting revenue between $1.195 billion and $1.205 billion. That came up short of a $1.21 billion forecast.

“Combined with growing criticalness of category, this should have been a Q where it sustained recent gains; lack of material guidance raise leaves in holding pattern,” wrote analysts at Morgan Stanley.

Cybersecurity companies are in the middle of a significant inflection, spurred by Anthropic’s Mythos model and the rise of autonomous AI agents that are capable of exploiting vulnerabilities faster than ever before. That’s forcing businesses to scale their security defenses and invest in newer tools.

At the same time, some cybersecurity stocks have sold off this year, getting swept up in broader market fears that new AI tools will displace software businesses.