Meta Implements Employee Activity Tracking to Enhance AI Development

Wed Apr 22 2026 11:25:59 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Meta's new initiative to monitor worker interactions raises concerns among employees amid ongoing job cuts as the company ramps up its investment in AI technology.

Meta has announced a new tool that will monitor employees' keystrokes and mouse clicks to collect data for training artificial intelligence models. This move comes as the company is facing internal criticism and job cuts. Employees have expressed concerns over the invasive nature of the tracking amid a larger trend within the company to focus heavily on AI advancements.

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 an AI model while workers expect a slew of additional job cuts feels very dystopian.

This company has become obsessed with AI, they told the BBC.

Another employee who recently left the company stated 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, and employees have been expecting deeper job losses in the coming months, as previously reported by the BBC.

Last month, the company enacted a partial hiring freeze which now appears to be more far-reaching.

A website used by Meta to advertise job openings hosted about 800 listings in March; it is now listing only seven jobs.

Meta's spokesman declined to comment on the company's removal of job listings or plans for cuts.

The new tracking tool, named the Model Capability Initiative (MCI), is designed to log employee activity for AI training.

While employee activity on Meta computers was previously accessible to the company, this marks a new approach focused specifically on enhancing AI capabilities.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's co-founder and chief executive, has pledged to ramp up spending on AI projects this year, aiming to position the firm at the forefront of the technology.

Meta plans to invest approximately $140 billion in AI in 2026, doubling its previous spending in this area.

In 2025, the company acquired a significant stake in Scale AI alongside bringing some executives to bolster its AI model development.

The recent launch from its reformed Meta Superintelligence Labs group was the AI model Muse Spark.

With the data gathered from the new employee tracker, Meta hopes to enhance the performance of future AI models.

Zuckerberg mentioned at the start of the year that 2026 will see AI dramatically change workplace dynamics, allowing projects once requiring large teams to be accomplished by significantly fewer people.