Imagine your first job comes with a 401(k), a retirement account funded by your paychecks. You never pick an investment, so your money lands in the plan’s default fund. Years later, you learn that about a third of that fund sat in hedge funds and private equity, and that it trailed many similar-looking funds. Could you take the people running the plan to court?

That scenario is the question being asked in Anderson v. Intel Corporation Investment Policy Committee, which the Supreme Court heard on Tuesday, October 6, 2026. The question sounds pretty simple. Before a lawsuit like this can go forward, must workers identify a “meaningful benchmark,” a comparable fund that did better? The answer could shape how easily employees can challenge decisions about their retirement savings.

Two Intel retirement plans offered a balanced fund (a mix of stocks and bonds) and target-date funds, which automatically shift from stocks toward safer bonds as an employee’s retirement year approaches. After the 2008 financial crisis, the committees running the plans put much more money into hedge funds (private investment pools that use complex strategies) and private equity (investments in privately owned companies). Those committees are fiduciaries, people legally required to manage other people’s money carefully and in the savers’ interest.

The former employees call that choice reckless. According to their brief, roughly a third of one default fund was in these assets, far above what major fund providers did, despite regulators’ warnings about cost, opacity, and difficulty selling quickly. Intel’s fiduciaries respond that the goal was to cushion savers from market crashes, and that they told participants in advance the funds would lag stock-heavy funds during bull markets.

Winston Anderson, a former Intel employee, sued in 2019 on behalf of a class (a group of similarly affected people), and his case was combined with an earlier suit by another former employee. The district court dismissed the complaint, and in May 2025 the Ninth Circuit affirmed. Both courts said the workers compared Intel’s funds to stock-heavy funds with different goals, so the comparison proved nothing.

The Supreme Court took the case in January 2026 because the different appeals courts disagree. The Eighth and Ninth Circuits demand a meaningful benchmark, while the Sixth Circuit says one is useful but not always required.

“Dismissed” matters here. On a motion to dismiss, a judge assumes the complaint’s facts are true and asks whether the claim is plausible enough to continue into discovery, the phase when each side must hand over documents and testimony. Workers rarely see a fund committee’s internal decisions until discovery.

The law at issue is ERISA, passed in 1974. It requires fiduciaries to act with “care, skill, prudence, and diligence,” like a prudent person acting in “an enterprise of a like character and with like aims.” Courts call this the duty of prudence.

The workers argue that ERISA never mentions benchmarks, and that ordinary pleading rules tell judges to weigh all of a complaint’s allegations together. In their telling, the Ninth Circuit threw out every performance allegation once it decided no comparator qualified, without asking whether the complaint as a whole was plausible. They also say the rule rewards strange strategies, since the more unusual a fund is, the harder its twin is to find.

They lean on two precedents. In Fifth Third Bancorp v. Dudenhoeffer (2014), the Court rejected a special hurdle for one type of ERISA claim. In Hughes v. Northwestern University (2022), it rejected a categorical pleading rule and told courts to examine allegations as a whole.

Intel’s brief starts from the idea that the duty of prudence looks at how fiduciaries made decisions and guarantees no particular return. Nearly every fund trails some other fund over some stretch, and a cautious fund will usually lag an aggressive one in a rising market. A performance gap alone, Intel says, hints at nothing about bad judgment.

On Intel’s account, the benchmark rule is simply what ordinary plausibility looks like for underperformance claims. A comparator needs similar goals, and identical holdings are unnecessary. Intel also warns that easy lawsuits push employers toward costly settlements, higher insurance premiums, and fiduciaries who copy the crowd. The U.S. government filed an amicus brief (a “friend of the court” brief from a non-party) supporting Intel and will share argument time.

Four issues are important in this case.

First, what does “meaningful” mean? Intel says a comparator only needs similar aims. The workers say the Ninth Circuit’s real-world application demands something close to a twin.

Second, is the benchmark rule a new hurdle or ordinary plausibility? Both sides claim Dudenhoeffer. The workers read it as rejecting special pleading hurdles, while Intel points out that the Court itself set two bright-line pleading rules in that case.

Third, how should a plaintiff challenge an outlier strategy? If a fund is truly unusual, similar funds may not exist. Intel answers that goals can be compared even when holdings differ, and the Ninth Circuit said workers could have compared Intel’s funds to funds with similar risk-reduction aims.

Fourth, what can workers know before discovery? Intel says ERISA’s disclosure rules give participants plenty to work with. The workers say the reasoning behind investment decisions stays hidden until a case proceeds.

The outcome could take several forms. The Court could affirm the Ninth Circuit, as Intel asks, or vacate the judgment and send the case back for a fresh look at the whole complaint, as the workers ask. It could also write an opinion that explains what “meaningful” requires.