Artificial Intelligence

14,000 Sue Workday Over Alleged AI Hiring Discrimination

Are AI hiring tools a fixable technology worth improving or a discriminatory risk too dangerous to trust?

Published JUN 16

14,000 Sue Workday Over Alleged AI Hiring Discrimination

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Above: A smartphone displays the logo of Workday Inc. on Feb. 15. Image credit: Cheng Xin/Getty Images

The Facts

During a Monday hearing, a California judge appeared willing to allow claims that state employment law applied to AI human resources software Workday as part of a first-of-its-kind lawsuit over alleged algorithmic discrimination in hiring.
Mlex
Reuters
Lead plaintiff Derek Mobley, a Black man over 40 with anxiety and depression, filed the case in February 2023 after being rejected from more than 100 jobs applied to through Workday's platform, with some rejections arriving within hours or minutes of submission. He did not sue the employers but instead targeted Workday directly.
JD Supra
Information Week
In March 2026, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin rejected Workday's motion to dismiss a federal AI hiring discrimination lawsuit, allowing the case to proceed to discovery. The ruling came one day before the opt-in deadline in Mobley v. Workday, a 2023 case filed in the Northern District of California.
JD Supra
Forbes
Approximately 14,000 people over the age of 40 opted into the collective action by the deadline, claiming Workday's AI recruiting platform unfairly screened them out of employment opportunities. Workday declined to confirm the figure and reiterated that the allegations are false.
Information Week
Forbes
On May 29, Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler denied plaintiffs' motion to compel Workday's bias-testing data, ruling it was protected by attorney-client privilege because Workday's attorneys curated the data for legal advice purposes. The court did, however, order production of documents as to its knowledge of potential demographic disparities.
UC Today
Market Screener
Workday disclosed in a May 2025 court certification order that its software tools rejected applications numbering in the billions during the relevant opt-in period. The company reports serving more than 11,000 organizations globally, with over 65% of the Fortune 500 relying on its products.
The Herald Insight
Forbes

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The Spin

Pro-establishment narrative

AI hiring tools carry real bias risks, but the answer is better oversight and smarter design. Research shows these systems have complex biases that do not map onto standard categories cleanly, and can be constantly worked on and improved. The fix is rigorous impact assessments, testing and human review, because well-built AI can still outperform the flawed human judgment it replaces.

ITIF

VoxDev

Establishment-critical narrative

Workday's AI rejected one man over 100 times, and a federal court just said that's worth a nationwide lawsuit. When even top AI developers admit they don't know why their systems make the choices they do, trusting those systems with hiring decisions is reckless. Employers using these tools are sitting on a legal time bomb, and no efficiency gain is worth discriminating against protected workers.