Lin ruled Monday that California FEHA claims can proceed in the Workday lawsuit over AI hiring tools alleged to screen applicants unfairly. The judge said the law can reach alleged conduct tied to California when a company headquartered there is said to have carried out the challenged screening.
That ruling keeps the California discrimination claims alive for applicants who say Workday tools rejected them, including Mobley, whose allegations were tied to asthma, cancer survivorship, and medical-related leave, treatment, and recovery patterns. Lin also let several other claims move forward while narrowing the case by throwing out a race-based disparate impact claim and an employer-liability theory.
Workday headquarters in California
Lin said FEHA can apply when a participating actor residing in California allegedly violated the law in dealings with a nonresident and the complaint shows a sufficient nexus between California and the challenged conduct. Workday is headquartered in California, and it did not challenge assertions that its AI tools were designed, developed, maintained, and controlled from that headquarters.
Workday also did not challenge allegations that it trained and operated the tools in California, or that the screening and rejection originated there. That is the piece that kept the California claims in the case even though the applications at issue came from outside the state.
Mobley and the screening claims
The suit began as a proposed class action in February 2023 and alleged that Workday’s applicant screening technology discriminated on the basis of age, race, and disability. The original claims relied on the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, and later amended complaints added FEHA claims.
The plaintiff said that since 2017 he had applied for over 100 positions at companies that use Workday tools for recruiting and was rejected for every position. He said the rejections were often immediate or came in the middle of the night, which led him to infer that the process was automated.
May 2025 collective action
The collective action was approved in May 2025, and Lin said that if the collective is in the “hundreds of millions” of people, that is because Workday has been plausibly accused of discriminating against a broad swath of applicants. Lin also wrote that “Allegedly widespread discrimination is not a basis for denying notice.”
Workday pushed back sharply. A Workday spokesperson said, “The claims in the suit are false.” The spokesperson also said, “Workday’s AI recruiting tools don’t make hiring decisions in California or anywhere else,” and added that “Our customers maintain full control of their hiring processes and our tools are designed with human oversight at their core.”
California FEHA and the case ahead
The company said, “Our technology looks only at job qualifications, not protected traits like race, age, or disability,” and said, “We rigorously test our products as part of our Responsible AI program to confirm our tools do not harm protected groups.” Lin’s ruling leaves the FEHA claims and several other claims in place, so the case continues on whether the challenged screening tools can be tied to unlawful discrimination under California law.
Mobley’s amended allegations give the case a more specific factual path: rejected applications, medical leave, treatment, and recovery patterns. The next step is the court process itself, where the surviving claims will test whether Workday’s California-linked systems can be treated as part of the alleged screening conduct.
