EEOC v. Morgan Stanley
Active Case
Kistler v. Eightfold AI
Outten & Golden and Towards Justice are representing workers in a critical new front in the fight against widespread AI abuses in the labor market.
According to this first-in-the-nation proposed class action lawsuit, Eightfold AI’s platform allegedly generates secretive, AI‑driven “consumer reports” on job applicants—often without their knowledge, consent, or any opportunity to correct errors—before the reports are used to screen them for jobs.
Eightfold’s technology allegedly operates behind the scenes of online job applications at some of the nation’s largest employers.
While applicants submit resumes and wait for a response, Eightfold allegedly scrapes vast amounts of personal data—much of it inaccurate, incomplete, or drawn from unknown third-party sources—and funnels it through a proprietary large language model to score and rank candidates based on their supposed “likelihood of success” in the role.
Just like employment background checks, the lawsuit describes how these AI-generated evaluations function as consumer reports under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) and California law. Yet the complaint alleges that Eightfold provides none of the basic legal protections that have governed such reports for decades: no disclosure that a report exists, no access to the report itself, no opportunity to dispute errors, and no safeguards before the information is used to make life-altering employment decisions.
The workers in this proposed class action are represented by Christopher M. McNerney, Jenny R. Yang, and Allison Aaronson of Outten & Golden LLP; and Rachel W. Dempsey, David Seligman, and Seth Frotman of Towards Justice.
Framing the Issue
- According to Pew Research Center, about half of workers (52%) say they feel worried about how AI may be used in the workplace in the future.
- In a recent study by the Stanford Institute for Human Centered AI, trusting AI was a top concern for workers: specifically, 45% expressed doubts about the accuracy and reliability of AI systems, while 23% feared job loss and 16% worried about the lack of human oversight.
- A Resume.org survey of 1,399 workers found 57% of companies already use AI in hiring, and 3 in 4 companies allow AI to reject candidates without human oversight.
