Meta Stipulated for Special Master Privilege Review After Denial of Request for A.I. Review

“Meta Platforms Inc. has agreed to have an independent special master rereview potentially thousands of documents the company withheld as privileged in social media addiction multidistrict litigation, after a California federal judge criticized Meta’s privilege claims and refused to let Meta use an AI tool to rereview 170,000 documents at issue.”  Dorothy Atkins, Meta To Rereview MDL Privilege Claims Under Special Master – Law360 (Oct. 20, 2026)(emphasis added).

Ms. Atkins reports:

[Meta’s attorney] also asked the judge if Meta could use an artificial intelligence tool to save time and help rereview the documents at issue quickly, but Judge Gonzalez Rogers rejected the request outright, noting it would take time to test the AI tool’s accuracy.

‘I don’t trust AI obviously as much as you do,’ the judge said. ‘The only way that argument would have any legs is if you trained a model on your own, and obviously all of the training would have to be done and disclosed — all of it — and all of the testing.’

Law360 has posted the Joint Stipulation at 2026-10-19 stipulation with proposed [dckt 3597_0].pdf.  It calls for a “minimum average pace of 20,000 documents each week….”  Meta agreed to pay costs of the Special Master. Id.