At this point, Meta’s artificial intelligence-focused pivot is no longer a bombshell headline in the news. The tech giant’s founder Mark Zuckerberg has long established his interest in investing hundreds of billions of dollars into AI, a move that has recently also sparked numerous layoff reports. However, a new report on the horizon appears to confirm that job cuts are no longer the only thing to be feared by the technology powerhouse’s employees.
First to break the news, Reuters cited internal memos shared with staffers, as it reported that Meta was installing a new software on US-based employees’ computers. The “tracking tool,” called Model Capability Initiative (MCI) will reportedly capture all mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes made by workers, only to train AI models that may potentially replace them down the line.
The presumably unsettling news for Meta employees comes days after sources familiar with upcoming sweeping layoff wave told Reuters that the company’s first round of massive job cuts will kick off on May 20. The purported initial round of job trouble is expected to take down about 10% of the company’s global workforce, with a follow-up round supposedly scheduled for the second half of 2026.
What is Meta’s ‘tracking tool,’ MCI?
According to the Reuters report, Instagram and Facebook’s parent company warned workers of forthcoming changes, announcing the arrival of the new tracking tool called Model Capability Initiative or MCI. The software in question will operate on Meta’s computers and internal apps to log employee activity, which will then be used as training data for AI tech.
As highlighted in one of the memos, posted by a staff AI research scientist on Tuesday in a channel for the company’s model-building Meta SuperIntelligence Labs team, Model Capability Initiative is expected to capture snapshots of the content displayed on workers’ screens.
“This is where all Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work,” the memo, as seen by Reuters, stated, emphasising that it would aid company’s AI models in places where they face hindrances in replicating human interaction with computers.
Adding to the same conversation, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said in a separate memo pushed on Monday that the company was levelling up its internal data collection as part of “AI for Work” efforts, which have now been branded as Agent Transformation Accelerator (ATA).
“The vision we are building towards is one where our agents primarily do the work and our role is to direct, review and help them improve,” he stated, adding the focus was on agents to “automatically see where we felt the need to intervene so they can be better next time.” MCI data would reportedly be included among these inputs.
Meta defends its position amid ‘AI obsession’ backlash
Amid fears of AI workforce overhaul, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said MCI’s data collection would not impact performance assessments or anything beyond AI model training.
Immediately countering any presumed backlash over potential privacy issues, a Meta spokesperson told the BBC that the data recorded in the process will not be “used for any other purpose.” Adding that MCI already has “safeguards in place to protect sensitive content,” the spokesman defended the move, saying, “If we’re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them.”
As also quoted by Reuters, Stone said, “If we’re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them — things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus.”
Despite Meta’s clarification, a company employee, speaking to the BBC on the condition of anonymity, slammed the backhanded development as “very dystopian.” Calling out the company’s obsession with AI, the staffer failed to come to terms with how employee actions on a computer would be used to train AI model as workers, thereby triggering a slew of additionally layoffs.
A former company employee, who recently cut ties with Meta, said the MCI tracking tool was “just the latest way they’re shoving AI down everyone’s throat,” according to the BBC.
The move sending shivers down employees’ backs has emerged at a time when Meta firmly stands by its place to spend a staggering amount of approximately $140 billion on AI in 2026. This marks a nearly two-fold jump from the firm’s investment in the booming technology the previous year.