Leaked audio from an April 30 Meta all-hands, obtained by More Perfect Union, captures Mark Zuckerberg explaining that the company has been monitoring its own engineers across Gmail, GChat, VS Code and internal assistant Metamate to train its AI models. The program, internally called the Model Capability Initiative, reportedly gathers keystrokes, mouse activity and periodic screenshots from company devices.
Zuckerberg justified using staff rather than outside contractors by arguing the AI learns best from watching elite engineers, whose expertise exceeds that of typical labelers. On tape he also acknowledged that fully explaining the initiative was not strategically beneficial and anticipated parts of the discussion would eventually leak.
The timeline drew sharp criticism: Meta disclosed keystroke and mouse-tracking software on April 21, reassigned 7,000 workers to AI teams on May 19, and issued roughly 8,000 layoff notices on May 20 — the same day the audio surfaced. Critics say workers were used as AI training data and then cut.