In Leaked Audio, Zuckerberg Tells Meta Workers He’s Been Using Them to Train AI Ahead of Mass Layoffs

“AI is a freight train, but the future is not a foregone conclusion,” said one engineer, urging his colleagues to sign a petition to stop Meta’s use of an AI tracking program. “It’s not too late to pump the brakes.”


Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attends the WSJ Innovator Awards in New York on October 29, 2025.
(Photo by Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
May 20, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Meta employees reported Wednesday that in the company’s offices on the day mass layoffs hit thousands of their colleagues, fliers were taped to walls urging workers to sign a petition in support of stopping the company’s new artificial intelligence data tracking program—which CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted late last month as a way for its new AI models to “learn from watching really smart people do things.”

A day before about 8,000 Meta employees began receiving emails notifying them that they were being laid off—a process that began in Singapore at 4:00 am local time Wednesday and continued in European and US offices in their respective time zones—the labor-focused media organization More Perfect Union shared a leaked audio file in which Zuckerberg was heard explaining how the AI training program worked.

“The average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people that you can get to do tasks,” said Zuckerberg. “So if we’re trying to teach the models coding, for example, then having people internally build tools or solve tasks that help teach the model how to code, we think is going to dramatically increase our model’s coding ability faster than what others in the industry have the capability to do, who don’t have thousands and thousands of extremely strong engineers at their company.”



He assured the company’s 78,000 employees that “no human is looking at or watching what people are doing on their computers... None of the data is being used for looking at what people are doing or surveillance or performance tracking or anything like that. It’s purely just that we are using this to feed a very large amount of content into the AI model so that way it can learn how smart people use computers to accomplish tasks.”

Zuckerberg explained how the employees have been used to train the model that could potentially replace many of them days after Meta announced it was planning to lay off about 10% of its workforce as the company invests heavily in AI, spending $125 billion to $145 billion on the technology—more than double what it spent last year.

The New York Times reported earlier this month that employees “revolted” when they learned about the AI tracking program, and expressed fears that they had unknowingly been training a model that would ultimately replace them.

An engineering manager asked on the company’s internal communication platform how workers can opt out of having their computer activity monitored to train the AI model, only to be told by chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, “There is no option to opt out on your corporate laptop.”

Another employee told Bosworth, “Your callousness to the concerns of your own employees is concerning.”

On Monday, The New York Times reported, employees learned that in addition to the layoffs, another 7,000 workers will be reassigned to help develop AI tools.

About 2,000 employees began working this month on a new Applied AI and Engineering team, which is set to use the data gathered by the AI tracking program Zuckerberg described to build AI tools. Those who volunteered to join the group would not be included in this week’s layoffs, the Times reported.

“Every company is training AI on their employees,” said Chen Avnery, an independent adviser on AI governance and data platforms. “Meta just said it out loud. The question stopped being, ‘Will AI replace you?’ a year ago. Now it’s whether you’re building the agents or generating their training data.”

More than 1,000 people in the company have signed the petition calling to halt the AI data program, according to the newspaper.

Software engineer Mack Ward urged his colleagues to sign on earlier this month, telling them in an internal post that “AI is a freight train, but the future is not a foregone conclusion.”

“It’s not too late to pump the brakes and consider how we, society, want to go about this,” Ward said. “Speaking up is never easy, but ‘easy’ isn’t what you were hired to do.”

Zuckerberg says he feels ‘weight’ of Meta layoffs


ByAFP
May 20, 2026


Image: — © AFP/File Hector RETAMAL

Meta began laying off roughly 8,000 employees Wednesday — about 10 percent of its global workforce — as co-founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg pushes to redirect resources toward an ambitious artificial intelligence agenda.

According to Bloomberg, notifications went out beginning in the early morning hours, with Singapore-based workers among the first to be informed.

In addition to the cuts, Meta said in April it would cancel plans to hire 6,000 people and shift 7,000 other employees into AI workflow-related roles.

In a memo to staff Wednesday, posted by Business Insider, Zuckerberg expressed thanks to departing employees and sought to reassure those remaining.

“It’s always sad to say good-bye to people who have contributed to our mission and to building this company,” he wrote. “I feel the weight of that.”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he felt the “weight” of laying off roughly 8,000 employees, or about 10 percent of its global workforce – Copyright AFP SAUL LOEB

Zuckerberg said he did not expect additional company-wide layoffs this year, and acknowledged the company had fallen short in its communications with staff.

He struck an optimistic tone about the company’s direction, saying Meta was “one of the few companies positioned to help define the future” and reaffirming his goal of delivering “personal superintelligence” to users worldwide.

The restructuring is the largest company-wide round of cuts since Zuckerberg’s 2022-2023 “Year of Efficiency” campaign, which eliminated roughly 21,000 positions.

The move comes as Meta dramatically ramps up spending on AI infrastructure.

Meta has forecasted capital expenditures to reach between $125 billion and $145 billion for the year — more than double the company’s 2025 outlay.