Meta to Cut About 10% of Workforce as It Increases AI Investment

Meta plans to cut about 10 percent of its workforce, or nearly 8,000 people, to run the company more efficiently and offset other investments, according to a human resources leader. The layoffs will add to the roughly 25,000 cuts Meta has announced over the past four years. News of the impending reductions leaked in March of this year.

Employees would find out in May whether they still had a job. Mark Zuckerberg addressed the layoffs in a companywide meeting last month. The message, as some employees understood it, was that he would prefer to keep everyone but that AI costs left his hands tied.

U.S. employees are typing and clicking to train AI models. Opting out of the tracking software is not possible, according to three Meta employees.

"Nobody is happy about it. And we have no choice," a current employee said. When employees protested the rollout in internal messages, chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth "belittled and berated" the dissenters, according to two Meta employees.

Mark Zuckerberg seemed to imply during an internal discussion that Meta preferred to monitor staff over external contractors because its employees were smarter, according to Meta sources. U.S. Meta offices urging colleagues to sign a petition to end the tracking program.

The petition cited "serious concerns around privacy, consent, and trust in the workplace" and stated that "any approach to AI that relies on intrusive, coercive, non-consensual data collection contradicts" Meta’s responsible AI principles. Protest organizers said, "We are all facing the impacts of what happens when worker protections, consent and safety are ignored to scale at any cost.

" Reuters first reported on the petition.

U.S. because of stricter privacy rules and employee protections in other jurisdictions, according to several Meta workers. In the UK, some Meta workers are registering signatures to form a labor union.

Organizers inside Meta wrote, "Our leadership are escalating their cruel and short-sighted behaviours. " United Tech & Allied Workers said last week that Meta employees wanted to organize with the group to protect their jobs, benefits, and privacy. Earlier this month, UK employees at Google DeepMind voted to unionize with the Communication Workers Union over concerns about selling AI to the US military.

Sixteen current and former Meta employees from a variety of roles spoke with WIRED about the installation of corporate software to track activity for training AI. The employees declined to be named because of company policies barring unsanctioned conversations with journalists. "I don’t know anyone having a good time.

The vibe is a bit ‘over it’—lack of connection to the mission, upcoming layoffs, American employees being used to train the AI models that will replace them," a policy staffer said. Anyone who can afford to leave is hoping to be laid off and receive the 16 weeks minimum of severance and 18 months of paid health care, according to several Meta employees.

" Only the individuals with the best pay packages and involved in the core development of AI seem to be thriving, according to a longtime senior leader at Meta.

An employee alleges that low morale is hindering Meta’s recruiting efforts. Meta rejects the assertion that low morale is hindering recruiting. A legal staffer said, "There’s a lot of anger and fear.

Meta’s ad business continues to perform well. The company reported nearly $27 billion in profits in the first three months of this year. 4 billion.

Mark Zuckerberg upped the company’s forecast for total capital expenditures by $10 billion to between $125 billion and $145 billion this year. Last year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered to pay several top AI researchers as much as $100 million a year. " In February, Meta cut the portion of annual raises paid in company shares by 5 percent on top of last year’s 10 percent reduction.

Median total compensation at Meta fell to $388,200 last year from $417,400 in 2024, according to public filings. Meta shares have fallen about 5 percent this year. "For many employees, salary is half stock, so that sucks," the Instagram employee said.

Meta largely declined to comment on specifics but pointed to previous public statements defending its job cuts and new AI-related projects. " Tracy Clayton said salaries are still trending higher than they were in 2022. " Early last month, Meta began forcibly moving at least 1,000 top engineers to a new Applied AI Engineering division.

Engineers refusing a transfer faced the prospect of a layoff. " In March, separate state court verdicts in California and New Mexico held Meta liable for product and policy failures and ordered it to pay a combined nearly $380 million in damages and civil penalties. Meta filed a motion in California requesting the verdict be overturned and is appealing the verdict in New Mexico.

Block, Coinbase, and Cloudflare have all laid off thousands of employees, citing AI as a catalyst for the restructuring. Mark Zuckerberg said during an earnings call last month that AI is changing the pace of work and that projects that previously would have taken months and dozens of workers now require one or two people and could be finished in a week. " Wired reported these developments.