In an internal memo last month, Meta told its US employees it was making a change that would affect tens of thousands of them.
What employees typed into their computer, how they moved their mouse, where they clicked and what they saw on the screen would be tracked, Meta said. The company’s goal was to capture employee data so that Meta’s artificial intelligence models could learn “how people actually perform everyday tasks using computers.”
Many workers immediately revolted. In online comments, they called the surveillance a violation of privacy and called it antisocial and callous.
“It makes me very uncomfortable,” a tech executive wrote in a comment in response to the announcement, which was reviewed by The New York Times. “How do we log out?”
“There is no option to log out on your company laptop,” replied Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer at Meta. Employees responded by posting more than 100 angry and surprised emojis, according to reports.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has staked his company’s future on artificial intelligence by putting powerful technology into apps like Facebook and Instagram and spending hundreds of billions of dollars developing AI models and data centers. But as the Silicon Valley company tries to transition from an Internet company to an AI organization, its embrace of the technology has been awkward and at times downright ugly.
Meta is pushing its 78,000 employees to embrace AI tools and factor their use of the technology into performance evaluations. The company also tracks employees’ computer work to feed and train its AI models. And it is cutting jobs to offset its AI spending, saying last month it would cut 10 percent of its workforce.
That has led to anger and anxiety as employees await word on whether they are affected by the layoffs, which are set to take place on May 20, according to 11 current and former Meta employees. Some said they no longer see the Met as a place for a long career. Others were looking for new jobs or trying to signal they wanted to be fired so they could get severance pay, current and former employees said.
“It’s incredibly demoralizing,” an employee who conducts user research wrote in an internal post reviewed by The Times.
The anxiety at Meta offers a glimpse of what may happen at other tech companies as they increasingly incorporate AI into their workplaces. Microsoft, Block, and Coinbase have recently announced layoffs or buyouts as AI reshapes work. The technology has been particularly disruptive in tech firms because AI tools are useful in generating code that was typically written by the software engineers who underpin many digital businesses.
“AI can potentially make everyone a better coder and help them do a lot more with fewer resources, but as a result, it also brings more intensity to workers’ daily lives,” said Leo Boussioux, a professor of information systems at the University of Washington. “There is no playbook yet for AI in the workplace.
Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton said in a statement that the purpose of the new employee tracking program was to train the company’s AI products. “Safeguards are in place to protect sensitive content and the data is not used for any other purpose,” he said.
Reuters and Information previously reported on some details of Meta’s internal AI push.
The meta’s shift to AI began not long after OpenAI released the ChatGPT chatbot in 2022. Last summer, Mr. Zuckerberg spent billions creating a lab for “superintelligence,” a futuristic form of AI that can act as the ultimate personal assistant, and revamped his AI division. Mr Zuckerberg, 41, has spoken at length about how superintelligence will improve people’s lives.
In March, Meta organized “AI Transformation Weeks” for its employees, five current and former employees said. The goal was to teach employees how to use AI coding tools and AI agents, which are digital assistants that can do tasks themselves. Product designers, who style the way products look and how people interact with products, are told to use AI to try coding, and software coders are told to use AI to try designing products.
Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employee consumption of “tokens,” a unit of AI usage roughly equivalent to four characters of text, the four people said. Some said the panels were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with peers. That led some employees to produce so many AI agents that others had to introduce agents to find agents and agents to rate agents, the two people said.
17 April Reuters reported that Meta will soon lay off 10 percent of its employees. Employees worried about whether they were training their AI replacements, the three people said.
After Meta said late last month that it would begin monitoring employee computer use, hundreds of workers came forward. “Your callousness to the concerns of your own employees is disturbing,” one employee told Mr. Bosworth in an internal posting.
In other posts that day, employees questioned whether Meta could safely secure the data it collected from workers and use that information to train AI models.
“This data is very tightly controlled,” Mr Bosworth replied. “That won’t be a leak risk.
Two days later, Meta announced that it would lay off about 8,000 people this month. The cuts will allow the company to “offset other investments we’re making,” Janelle Gale, Meta’s head of human resources, said in an internal memo. She added: “I know it’s going to leave everyone with almost a month of uncertainty, which is incredibly worrying.”
Some employees have since shared layoff guides and nihilistic memes. “It doesn’t matter,” read one internally shared meme. Staffers have created at least three websites counting down the time to the May 20 layoffs, with one website headlined: “Big Beautiful Layoff,” a play on the 2025 domestic policy bill that President Trump has called “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
The meta hinted at more changes. “We really don’t know what the optimal size of the company will be in the future,” Susan Li, chief financial officer, said on a call with investors last week. “I think there’s a lot of change right now, the capabilities of artificial intelligence are developing rapidly.
The day after the investor call, Mr. Zuckerberg held a company-wide Q&A with other executives. During the meeting, the transcript of which was reviewed by The Times, Mr. Zuckerberg said that Meta does not collect employee data for “tracking or performance tracking or anything like that.” Instead, the data would train the AI on “how smart people use computers to complete tasks,” he said.
“I think we know that artificial intelligence is one of the most competitive fields, probably in history,” Mr. Zuckerberg added.
Mike Isaac contributed reporting from San Francisco.
