Aakash Gupta@aakashgupta
Derek Mobley applied to over 100 jobs. He was rejected from every single one. Several rejections came at 1am, within minutes of submitting.
He just became the lead plaintiff in the largest AI lawsuit ever certified.
May 2025, Judge Rita Lin granted preliminary certification of a nationwide ADEA collective in Mobley v. Workday. Workday's own court filings represent that 1.1 billion job applications were rejected through its software in the relevant period. The court discussed potential class size in the hundreds of millions.
If you're over 40 and you applied to a Fortune 500 in the last 7 years, your application was probably processed by Workday. You may be in the class.
The legal precedent matters more than the headline number. For decades, the vendor screening applicants for an employer was not directly liable under Title VII. The employer was the only defendant. In July 2024, Judge Lin ruled the AI vendor itself qualifies as an "agent" of the employer and can be sued directly. First time. The "we're just the tools" defense evaporated in a single ruling.
Same precedent now extends to every HR tech AI vendor in the pipeline. Greenhouse. Eightfold. HireVue. Paradox. None of it is priced into any of their valuations.
Combine that with the rest of 2024. Air Canada lost in February for $812 because its chatbot hallucinated a refund policy, killing the chatbot-as-separate-entity defense. iTutorGroup paid $365K to the EEOC, confirming the algorithm doing the discriminating moves liability nowhere. Gemini cost Alphabet roughly $90B in market cap in days for one weekend of bad image generation.
Every legal shield around AI in production got tested in court and lost. The AI PMs interviewing for foundation model roles can recite all four by month. Most engineers shipping AI at work cannot.
