An audio clip allegedly leaked from Meta is causing major backlash after it seemed to show that the tech giant was carefully watching employees at all times with an ulterior motive in mind.
In the now-viral clip, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg seems to defend the use of employee-monitoring software as a part of the company's broader push for AI that most recently led to 8,000 jobs cut at about 4 AM (local time) on Wednesday.
"We're in a phase where basically the AI models learn from watching really smart people do things," Zuckerberg allegedly says in the clip, which, amid the layoffs, has sparked speculations of the tech giant using the monitoring software to filter out people by their usefulness to the development of its artificial intelligence systems.
Though THE WEEK could not verify if the viral audio clip was AI-generated or not, it does align with earlier reports about Meta's Model Capability Initiative (MCI).
The tool, which was installed on employees' computers back then, was expected to run on work-related apps and websites. It is reportedly capable of capturing mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes for use in training its artificial intelligence models.
However, one of the more controversial features of the app was its ability to take occasional snapshots of content on employees’ screens, a Reuters report said in April, citing an internal memo from an AI research scientist on the Meta Superintelligence Labs team.
The report also cited Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth's memo to employees at around the same time that the tech giant, in general, would be increasing internal data collection as part of its 'AI for Work' initiatives, which were later rebranded as the Agent Transformation Accelerator (ATA).
Meta's layoffs
This comes as thousands of employees at Meta woke up to bad news on Wednesday (local time), with the latest round of layoffs affecting 8,000 people across the world.
This is part of the company's broader restructuring plans around AI—expected to hit the engineering and product teams the hardest—with further rounds of layoffs expected later in 2026.
However, the scale of the upcoming layoffs will be adjusted according to developments in the company's AI capabilities.