Meta mandates 7,000 workers move to new AI teams amid discontent

As Meta races to recenter itself around artificial intelligence, the tech giant is mandating more than 7,000 workers must move to new teams, and it’s radically changing some employees’ jobs. The Guardian has also learned that some of these reassigned employees will shift to two new teams: one building AI cloud infrastructure and another that’s building an internal AI agent codenamed Hatch.

Late last week, Meta employees received a notice that engineers had been “selected” for reassignment and would begin reporting to the cloud infrastructure and Hatch teams by the end of this week. Meta made a similar move last month when it reshuffled at least 1,000 engineers onto a new data labelling team called Applied AI, or AAI – at first giving them the option to volunteer, but later telling workers, “transfers aren’t optional.”

“Our work, infrastructure and our products are fundamentally changing as a result of the continued acceleration of AI,” wrote Peter Hoose, vice-president of production engineering at Meta, in an internal post about the two new teams, viewed by the Guardian. “The pace of what we are building is unprecedented, and these are exactly the kind of challenges that define what we do best.”

A Meta employee referenced last month’s reshuffle in a comment on Hoose’s announcement, writing, “Does ‘selected’ imply this is an [Applied AI]-style draft rather than a voluntary move?”

A Meta spokesperson confirmed the shift and said the teams are about 25 people each.

Meta is also taking away some managers’ direct reports and shifting these managers into roles where they’re expected to produce work more than oversee others – a shift that’s underway throughout Silicon Valley as companies embrace AI tools and try to flatten their management structures.

This rapid-fire reorganization is stirring up discontent within Meta during an already volatile era. “The new orgs showcase a shift in top level management strategy towards micro-authoritarianism,” said a Meta engineer, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press. Instead of empowering employees, it feels like Meta’s attitude has shifted to, “‘No, we tell you what to do, and command and order is the way forward,’” this employee told the Guardian.

Meta is expected to lay off approximately 10% of its workforce this week – despite record earnings during the first three months of 2026. Workers are also riled up over the company’s plans to surveil them extensively at work and use the data it collects to train AI models. The company has begun rolling out a monitoring tool called Model Capability Initiative, which tracks workers’ mouse movements, keystrokes, every time they open and close their laptop and anything they copy and paste – and feed it into their AI model as training data.

A Meta spokesperson told the Guardian: “If we’re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them – things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus. To help, we’re launching an internal tool that will capture these kinds of inputs on certain applications to help us train our models. There are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and the data is not used for any other purpose.”

The company’s employees don’t seem to be reassured by this.

Historically, Meta was known for its generous perks and flexibility: high pay, free meals, and often giving workers the autonomy to choose what they worked on. But since Meta’s first-ever layoffs in 2022, the company’s internal culture has shifted. The Meta engineer interviewed by the Guardian said the company has been whittling away perks over time. “Small acts foreshadowed what was to come: rolling layoffs with months of uncertainty before confirmation, MCI, drafting … It feels like they are trying to defeat our spirit by landing multiple attacks at once.”

All of this has been making Meta workers feel disillusioned at work. Last week, a group of employees began attempting to organize their colleagues to push back against Meta’s AI plans. They posted flyers across at least five US Meta offices that asked questions like, “Want Meta to stop collecting employee data to feed to their AI models?” and asked employees to sign a petition demanding Meta to “not collect employee ‘computer-use’ data for the purposes of training AI Models”.

So far, more than 500 Meta employees have signed the petition, a Meta data scientist who requested anonymity for fear of career repercussions, told the Guardian. “Meta has an extreme culture of fear,” they said, adding that the company typically quashes employee dissent. But, this is the “first time” Meta workers have rallied against the company in more than a year.

In addition to this petition, a group of Meta workers in the UK are organizing to form a union with United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW).

These latest developments mark a notable shift in the mood at the world’s largest social media company. In the past, Meta employees have been outspoken and criticized management – including an employee-organized virtual walkout in 2020 over Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s handling of Donald Trump’s posts encouraging violence against Black protesters. But since 2022 when layoffs began, workers have mostly been quiet.

OpenAI, Google and Anthropic’s consumer AI products are already in the lead, so Meta has been playing catch-up in the AI race. In January, Zuckerberg said in an earnings call that the company will spend up to $135bn on AI infrastructure this year “to train leading models and deliver personal super intelligence to billions of people and businesses around the world”. Last month, Meta launched its AI model, Muse Spark, the first one to have come out of Meta Superintelligence Labs. Achieving these AI ambitions will require not just infrastructure, but also engineers – which means the company is treading a fine line as its layoffs and internal reorganizations impact employee morale.