The company that once told you “move fast and break things” is now moving fast and breaking careers, while letting those cut from the job train the AI before they leave.
Meta just informed employees in an internal memo on Thursday that it plans to cut 10% of its workforce, roughly 8,000 people, next month. Thousands of open roles that the company had been actively hiring for will also be quietly deleted. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the cuts but refused to elaborate.
Why, you might ask? Meta is on track to pour $135 billion into AI this year alone, and that money has to come from somewhere.
If you were surprised by the news, Zuck was not. Back in January, the Meta CEO publicly hinted that layoffs were coming. He said he had watched employees leaning hard on AI tools become dramatically more productive, with a single person now capable of delivering work that once required an entire team.
“I think that 2026 is going to be the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work,” Zuckerberg said. Translation: a lot of you are about to find that out the hard way.
Now here’s the part that feels like a rejected Black Mirror script, pure dystopian black comedy.
This same week, Meta informed employees that it would begin tracking and logging their interactions with work computers to help train and improve its AI models. So while staff wait to find out if they still have a job next month, their keystrokes are being harvested to train the very systems reshaping the company.
