Meta will start tracking the way employees work, including their keystrokes and mouse clicks, to train its artificial intelligence models, the company told workers on Tuesday. The new tool will run on Meta computers and internal apps, logging activity that the company says will be used as training data for AI technology.
The system is called Model Capability Initiative, or MCI, and Meta says the data will not be used for any other purpose. A spokesman said the tool has safeguards in place to protect sensitive content. The move puts a surveillance-like layer on top of work that employees already knew could be seen by the company, since activity on Meta computers was previously accessible, but tracking it specifically to train AI is new.
The push lands as Meta moves harder toward artificial intelligence and tighter control over its workforce. The company has already laid off around 2,000 employees this year in smaller rounds of cuts, and a partial hiring freeze imposed last month now appears broader than first suggested. A jobs website Meta uses to advertise open roles hosted about 800 listings in March; it is showing just seven now.
Inside the company, the reaction has not been subtle. One employee called the plan “very dystopian,” while another said, “This company has become obsessed with AI.” A person who recently left Meta said the tracker was “just the latest way they’re shoving AI down everyone’s throat.” The comments reflect a growing belief among current and former workers that the company is moving from experimentation to compulsion.
Meta plans to spend roughly $140bn on AI in 2026, after taking over nearly half of Scale AI with a $14bn investment in 2025 and bringing some of that company’s executives inside Meta to help build out its models and tools. The first major release from Meta Superintelligence Labs arrived last month with the AI model Muse Spark. The new tracker is meant to feed the next wave, giving Meta real examples of how people use computers so it can train models and agents on everyday tasks.
Mark Zuckerberg has made AI the company’s defining priority, and the new logging tool shows how far Meta is willing to go to get there. Employees have been expecting deeper job losses in the months ahead. What happens next is whether the company’s AI ambitions keep expanding faster than the workforce can absorb them.