Amazon.com Services was hit with an employment lawsuit Tuesday on behalf of an artificial intelligence researcher who alleges that she was subjected to pregnancy and family leave discrimination as the company sought to cut corners in order to keep up with rival models from Microsoft and Google.

Attorneys with King & Siegal filed suit in Los Angeles County Superior Court on behalf of the plaintiff, Viviane Ghaderi, a sought-after researcher who developed AI systems to guide the blind, She was hired by Amazon as a software engineering manager to help contribute to its early AI efforts in 2022. Amazon had invested up to $4 billion in an another generative AI startup, Anthropic, to try and keep pace with Microsoft and Google. Ghaderi said she was assigned several important projects under her supervision and was promoted to create a new, science-focused team concentrating on data quality and compliance in the Alexa organization, the complaint said.