In brief
Meta, the tech giant behind Facebook and Instagram, has announced the introduction of a new tool that will monitor employee keystrokes and mouse clicks to enhance the training of its AI technologies. While Meta assures that the data will solely serve the purpose of improving AI, employees express concerns over privacy and the implications of such tracking in light of ongoing job cuts.
Meta will start tracking the way employees work, including their keystrokes and mouse clicks, to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models.
The company, which owns Instagram and Facebook, told workers on Tuesday that a new tool will run on Meta's computers and internal apps, logging their activity to be used as training data for AI technology.
A Meta spokesman told the BBC: If we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them.
The data is not used for any other purpose, he said, adding that the tool has safeguards in place to protect sensitive content.
But one Meta employee, who asked not to be identified, said having their smallest actions on a computer being used to train AI model as workers expect a slew of additional job cuts feels very dystopian.
This company has become obsessed with AI, they told the BBC.
Another person who recently left the company said the tracking tool is just the latest way they're shoving AI down everyone's throat.
Meta has already laid off around 2,000 employees this year in smaller rounds of cuts, but employees have been expecting deeper job losses in the coming months, as the BBC previously reported.
Last month, the company enacted a partial hiring freeze which now appears to be more far-reaching.
A website that Meta uses to advertise all of its jobs hosted about 800 listings in March. Now, it is advertising just seven jobs.
Meta's spokesman declined to comment on the company's removal of job listings or plans for cuts.
Meta's new tracking tool is called Model Capability Initiative or MCI, according to Reuters which first reported the move.
The BBC has been told that an employee's activity on a Meta computer would have been accessible to the company before, however tracking and logging specifically for the purpose of training and improving AI tools is new.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's co-founder and chief executive, recently pledged to ramp up spending on AI projects this year and is attempting to position the firm at the forefront of the technology.
Meta plans to spend roughly $140bn on AI in 2026, almost double the amount it invested in the technology a year ago.
In 2025, it took over nearly half of Scale AI with a $14bn (£10.3bn) investment, and brought some executives of the data-labeling firm into Meta to help it build out its AI models and tools.
The first significant launch from the company's reformed Meta Superintelligence Labs group emerged last month with the AI model Muse Spark.
With the data gathered from the new employee tracker, Meta is hoping to train new AI models that will come out of the lab.
In January, Zuckerberg said that 2026 will be the year that AI dramatically changes the way we work.
We're starting to see projects that used to take big teams now be accomplished by a single, very talented person, he said at the time.
