Meta to Monitor Employee Keystrokes and Mouse Movements to Train AI Agents

Report: Meta will train AI agents by tracking employees' mouse, keyboard use

Meta will begin tracking the mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes of its US employees to generate high-quality training data for future AI agents, Reuters reports. The news organization cites internal memos posted by the Meta Superintelligence Labs team in reporting on the new Model Capability Initiative employee-tracking software. That software will operate on specific work-related apps and websites and also make use of periodic screenshots to provide context for the AI training, according to the memo. "This is where all Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work," the memo reads, in part, Reuters reports. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told Reuters that the collected training data will help Meta's AI agents with tasks that it sometimes struggles with, including "things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus." "If we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how we actually use them," Stone said, adding that the collected data would not be used to evaluate employees. While Meta's US employees will have their actions tracked by the new tracking software, similarly monitoring European Meta employees would likely run afoul of a number of national laws limiting how an employer can track employee actions. Meta has faced potential legal problems in the EU for forcing users of its social media services to opt-out of having their content used for AI training, rather than affirmatively opting in. Getting on the training train The Internet contains enormous amounts of text, images, and video that can be used to train generative AI models (with some important and heavily argued legal limits). But obtaining high-quality training data for physical actions or virtual computer interactions has proven more difficult. Some companies have resorted to complex physics simulations of elaborate hand-tracking prosthetics to create human interaction data that an AI robotics model can understand. Meta's move comes as major tech companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Perplexity, have in recent months introduced new tools that let AI agents take over your computer or web browser to complete certain tasks. Ars' own initial tests of some of these consumer offerings showed a surprising ability to convert many natural-language commands into virtual actions, with some significant limitations and brittleness regarding long-term automated tasks. Meta has also reportedly begun setting AI usage goals among some employees, including coders and engineers. The company is also reportedly planning to start laying off up to 10 percent of its global workforce starting in May.

Meta will record employees' keystrokes and use it to train its AI models | TechCrunch

Meta has found a new source of training data for its AI models: its own employees. The company plans to use data culled from the mouse movements and keystrokes of its own staff in its pursuit to build more capable and efficient artificial intelligence. The story, which was first reported by Reuters, shows the lengths to which tech companies are going to find new sources of training data -- the lifeblood of AI models that helps the programs learn how to more effectively carry out tasks and respond to user queries. When reached for comment by TechCrunch, a Meta spokesperson provided the following statement: "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." This trend would seem to reveal the troublesome privacy implications of the AI industry, as yesterday's internal corporate communications are increasingly becoming fodder for a new corporate supply chain. Last week it was reported that old startups were being scavenged for their corporate communications (from Slack archives, Jira tickets and other internal messaging platforms), which could be converted into AI fuel.

Meta Will Track Employees' Keystrokes, Clicks and Mousing to Train AI

Meta will track its employees' keystrokes, clicks and mouse movements -- and even capture screenshots of what's on their computer screens -- to help train the company's AI models. That's according to a Reuters report on Tuesday, citing an internal memo sent to workers. According to the memo, Meta will install a new software program called the Model Capability Initiative on the computers of US-based employees and contractors. The tracking software will operate on work-related apps and websites and is part of Meta's plan to build AI agents that can do tasks autonomously. The announcement, published in its entirety by Business Insider, said that monitored apps and URLs would include Gmail, GChat and Metamate, an employee AI assistant. Workers' phones would not be included in the tracking. Business Insider reported that Meta employees were "up in arms" about the plan to use tracking software. On an internal communications website seen by the news outlet, one employee wrote, "This makes me super uncomfortable. How do we opt out?" Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth responded, "There is no way to opt out on your work laptop," prompting staff to react with shocked, crying and angry emoji, according to Business Insider. As it invests in AI development -- more than $135 billion this year -- Meta continues to reduce headcount. The company plans to lay off about 8,000 employees, 10% of its workforce of 79,000, starting May 20. The company reportedly has cut 25,000 jobs since 2022. Meta wants to train its AI on tasks it cannot yet replicate, focusing on how people actually use their computers. This includes such actions as selecting options from dropdown menus and using keyboard shortcuts. "This is where all Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work," the memo said. Reuters said the memo was posted by an unidentified AI research scientist on Tuesday in a channel for the company's SuperIntelligence Labs team. According to Reuters, Bosworth told employees that the long-term vision was for AI agents to "do the work" while employees direct them and help them improve. He did not specifically say how the agents would be trained with the data, but did say that Meta would rigorously gather data "for all the types of interactions we have as we go about our work." Eric Null, director of the Privacy and Data Project at the digital rights organization Center for Democracy & Technology, said Meta's plan to track employee computer interactions is one of the most "invasive" forms of workplace surveillance. "That invasiveness underscores the need for clear privacy protections and AI guardrails," Null told CNET. "This type of surveillance can cause real harm to people with disabilities, and workers in general chafe at this kind of tracking. Using this data for AI training in particular has the potential to replicate structural biases." In a statement given to CNET, a Meta spokesperson said that tracking employees is intended to give AI models "real examples" of how people interact with their computers. "To help, we're launching an internal tool that will capture these kinds of inputs on certain applications to help us train our models," the spokesperson said. "There are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and the data is not used for any other purpose." Meta said it would not use the collected data in performance reviews and that managers would not be able to see it. Business Insider cited an unnamed source saying that, when hired, employees are told their work devices can be monitored by Meta.

Meta to Track Employee Mouse, Keyboard Activity to Train AI Models

Meta is planning to track employees' mouse and keyboard movements to accumulate data for AI training. The goal is to improve the company's AI agents that replicate human interaction with computers, Reuters reports, citing an internal memo shared with employees. The tracking software, called Model Capability Initiative (MCI), will be installed on work computers. The software will track employees' mouse and keyboard activity across work-related apps and websites, and occasionally capture screenshots of their work content. "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," a Meta spokesperson tells Reuters. Employee surveillance tools often raise privacy concerns and contribute to unhealthy work environments. Meta tells Reuters that the data collected through its MCI system won't be used for performance reviews and will include safeguards to protect sensitive employee information. For now, this tracking is limited to the company's US-based employees. The report arrives as AI advancements continue to push people out of jobs. Meta itself is planning to begin layoffs on May 20, Reuters reports in a separate article. The company laid off hundreds of employees from its Metaverse division at the start of this year. The latest round will eliminate 8,000 more jobs, which is around 10% of its global workforce. Meta won't be stopping there. The second half of the year will bring further job cuts, sources tell Reuters.

Meta staff protest surveillance software on work PCs

Zuck reportedly needs to capture workers' keystrokes to build AI Meta, the company built on watching everything its billions of users do online so it can keep them clicking on ragebait and targeted ads, is reportedly now installing surveillance software on employees' work computers. Newswire Reuters reports that Meta management sent staff a memo informing them that they'll soon run a new tool called "Model Capability Initiative" that will record their keystrokes, mouse movements, and even take occasional screenshots - all in the name of gathering data the social networking giant can use to build better AI models. Business Insider claims it's got the memo, which apparently says surveillance will observe workers as they use "work-related applications and URLs" including Gmail, GChat, VCCode, and an internal app called "Metamate". The document reportedly explains that Meta feels AI models don't understand how people use computers, so the company needs real-life examples of how meatbags click their way through a working day so it can build agents. CTO Andrew Bosworth apparently said collecting this data from Meta staff will help the company to realize a vision for a world "where our agents primarily do the work and our role is to direct, review and help them improve." All imagine that in the not-too-distant future many of us will designate some tasks that we currently undertake with our own brains and fingers on a physical PC to an agent that uses a virtual PC. AI folk imagine asking an agent to book an airfare, respond to email, or constantly scan e-tail sites to spot a discount for a desired item and then swoop in to make a purchase. Meta's term for this sort of thing is a "personal superintelligence" that CEO-for-life Mark Zuckerberg says "helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be." So long as your goals and aspirations don't include workplace privacy. This situation is replete with irony, given Meta has for years mined its users for information and often run afoul of privacy laws.

Meta Is Making Workers Train Their AI Replacements

Four years ago, Mark Zuckerberg, feeling like the admiral of the good ship Meta Platforms Inc., sent a memo to employees encouraging them to refer to themselves by the nautical term "Metamates," apparently to foster a sense of camaraderie and shared mission or something. Now he plans to spy on his own Metamates to help train the robots that will someday throw them overboard. They ought to mutiny. Meta plans to put tracking software on its employees' computers to track their mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes, Reuters reported on Tuesday. It will also randomly capture images of its workers' screens every now and then. All of this is meant to help train AI models to better mimic what human beings do when they work on computers, including tricky stuff like using drop-down menus. One reason to do such a thing is to help eventually replace those humans with AI models, which don't require paychecks or health insurance or common courtesy. In Zuckerberg's February 2022 memo, he suggested his employees adopt a motto of "Meta, Metamates, Me." This borrowed from a US Navy saying, "Ship, shipmates, self." In the Navy's context, it means that, when your ship is on fire or its toilets don't work or some other emergency, your first priority is taking care of the ship. Your shipmates are your next concern. Only after they're safe can you think about yourself. This hierarchy makes sense in a military context, where one willingly signs away one's life to be a weapon for one's country. It makes less sense in the context of writing computer code for a company that began as a website for ranking women by hotness and has since transitioned to other pursuits such as democracy-poisoning, virtual reality and, lately, artificial intelligence. Meta's tracking, known as the Model Capability Initiative, will apply only to work-related apps and sites, according to the internal memo Reuters obtained. So supposedly it won't teach robots how to order from DoorDash or Amazon, wasteful things humans often do instead of working. Nor will it be used for performance evaluations or other human-relations purposes, a Meta spokesperson reassured everybody. Its sole purpose is to "help our models get better simply ⁠by doing their daily work," according to the memo. But, even if you set aside panopticon-related concerns, this is still not good news for Metamates. The MCI will be just part of a broader data-harvesting campaign in service of AI for Work, Meta's self-described "effort to integrate AI into every tool, team, and process at Meta." That will necessarily mean fewer human workers; by May 20, in fact, there will be about 8,000 fewer of those, according to an earlier Reuters report. Meta plans to lay off that many Metamates, or about 10% of its total workforce, on that date. And that will just be the first round of job cuts. The second, of what could be a similar size, will come later in the year. Meta's expensive investment in AI is partly to blame. The company recently projected capital spending of $115 billion to $135 billion this year, more than double 2025's spree, most of which is going toward AI. Human paychecks must be sacrificed to help cover the costs. But Zuckerberg also clearly expects robots to replace those employees, telling Joe Rogan last year that he expected to soon have "an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code." If you are currently a mid-level engineer at Meta, this can't be reassuring. Knowing that your keystrokes and mouse clicks are helping to hasten your replacement, then perhaps you will be motivated to keystroke and mouse-click much less productively. This also speaks to the broader zeitgeist, in which 55% of Americans think AI will do them more harm than good, including taking their jobs. They have little faith it will be of much benefit to anyone but the CEOs like Zuckerberg who are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to make it happen. Meta's stock price has gone basically nowhere for the past two years. Investors may be waiting to see if Zuckerberg's massive investment in AI goes any better than his massive, failed investment in the Metaverse (remember that?). If his robots don't live up to his hopes, then he may well find he has fewer willing and able hands on deck to steer him to his next misadventure. More From Bloomberg Opinion: * Meta's Victory Lap Over Google on Ads Will Be Short: Dave Lee * Doomscrolling Dangers Are a Worthy Legal Target: Parmy Olson * A Fix for Gambling, Emissions and AI's Ills: Nicolas Rohatyn Want more Bloomberg Opinion? Terminal readers, head to OPIN <GO>. Or subscribe to our daily newsletter.

Exclusive: Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training data

NEW YORK, April 21 (Reuters) - Meta (META.O), opens new tab is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees' computers to capture mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes for use in training its artificial-intelligence models, part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, the company told staffers in internal memos seen by Reuters. The tool will run on a list of work-related apps and websites and will also take ⁠occasional snapshots of the content on employees' screens for context, according to one memo, posted by a staff AI research scientist on Tuesday in a dedicated internal channel for the company's model-building Meta SuperIntelligence Labs team. The purpose of the exercise, according to the memo, was to improve the company's models in areas where they still struggle, like choosing from dropdown menus and using keyboard shortcuts. "This is where all Meta employees ⁠can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work," it said. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the data collected would not be used for performance assessments or any other purpose besides model training and that ⁠safeguards were in place to protect sensitive content. "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," said Stone. Reporting by Katie Paul in New York and Jeff Horwitz in San Francisco; Editing by Matthew Lewis Contact: [email protected] Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Meta is tracking employee keystrokes on Google, LinkedIn, Wikipedia as part of AI training initiative

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., exits Los Angeles Superior Court in Los Angeles, California, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2026. Google, LinkedIn and Wikipedia are among hundreds of websites and apps where Meta plans to capture employee keystrokes and mouse clicks as part of a project to train its artificial intelligence models, according to internal messages viewed by CNBC. A new employee tracking tool, dubbed Model Capability Initiative (MCI), allows Meta to observe and collect data from staffers' actions on their work computers, Reuters first reported on Tuesday. The list of sites being tracked, which also includes Microsoft's GitHub, Salesforce's Slack and Atlassian, has not been previously reported. Meta properties like Threads and Manus are also on the list, which is still in flux and originally included AI apps like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude. The list of third-party sites and services the MCI tool is tracking was widely circulated internally and discussed on chat boards after a member of the Meta Superintelligence Labs, or MSL, sent a memo intended to assuage concerns about worker surveillance and privacy. CNBC viewed the memo. The data gathering project is tied to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's ambitious effort to catch up in generative AI, where the company has lagged behind OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. To try and close the gap, Zuckerberg went on a spending spree starting last summer, bringing in Scale AI's Alexandr Wang to build a team and develop new foundation models. Earlier this month, Meta unveiled its first major AI model since the costly hiring of Wang. Dubbed Muse Spark, the model marked the debut of the new Muse series developed by MSL, the AI unit that Wang oversees. Like other tech giants, Meta is pushing hard into AI agents that can perform various office and coding-related tasks that are typically accomplished by white-collar workers. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the project but didn't provide a comment on the list of sites being tracked. "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," the spokesperson said. "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." Multiple Meta employees characterized the data-tracking project as "dystopian" in internal messages viewed by CNBC. Others expressed concerns that MCI could widely expose sensitive data, including user passwords, details about new product development, and personal information about workers' immigration status, health or family members. The MSL staffer said in the memo that in order to "teach our models to be able to use computers," Meta requires a "big and unbiased" data set that reflects how employees work and do tasks on their corporate devices. "We need to capture on-screen content as the context of what was being manipulated or interacted with," the memo said. In listing a "few assurances," the MSL representative noted that the new tool would only be able to view employees' "screen contents" as they see them, and would "not read in files or attachments." "Any incidental personal information in your corporate email that may get captured from the screen, will not be learned by the model, due to the mitigations above," the memo said. Meta employees who are still concerned about the data-tracking tool, "can control what shows up on your screen by not doing personal work on your work computer," the memo said.

Hey Meta workers, are you getting paid for those keystrokes?

No longer content to subsume recognizable intellectual properties, the majority of the indexed internet and books (basically all of them), AI will apparently now begin devouring its own workforce. A report in Reuters alleged that the keystrokes, mouse movements and clicks of Meta's workforce are to be captured for the purposes of training AI -- something the company's communications department was happy to confirmed as accurate! In a cheery missive, a company spokesperson told Engadget that "If we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them [...] we're launching an internal tool that will capture these kinds of inputs on certain applications to help us train our models." All this leads one to ask the obvious question: hey, what the fuck? The nature of at-will employment in the United States is such that your boss basically never needs to explain why your job duties change, but it's rarely so sweeping, so brazen or so unavoidably tied to the reminder that you are being surveilled at a frighteningly granular level. Gross! Installing keyloggers on someone else's computer in a non-work setting can often constitute a criminal offense (hello CFAA!) and it's frankly weird we allow this sort of thing to happen in the workplace at all. But in this case, there's at least some possibility this data may eventually be used to replace the exact people currently strongarmed into making those clicks and clacking those keys -- or as a thin excuse to lay a lot of them off. It's not as though the data underpinning large language models is worthless. Ill-gotten information has been the subject of exorbitant settlements and many pending court cases with considerable sums riding on their eventual judgements. If Meta thought it could obtain this sort of data from its estimated 3.5 billion combined users instead of its comparably paltry body of employees without it immediately reading as the single most invasive chapter in a laughably long history of move fast, break things, and never admit to the mess, wouldn't it just... do that? Technology has progressed so far, yet people continue to really hate feeling taken advantage of. And that sort of thing is still bad for business. In a fragile economy floated by rampant self-dealing and the shifting moods of a few very rich weirdos, even the mere mention of AI's relentless forward march to annihilate its own creators can make a shoe company's stock pop, however briefly. Maybe that's why Meta was delighted to confirm the broad details of the Reuters story, yet declined multiple requests to comment on if workers can opt out of this surveillance, or if they are being compensated in any way for their data. I, for one, would still love to know!

Meta will record employee screens, clicks, and keystrokes to train AI that may replace them

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. A hot potato: Working for a large tech company isn't the job utopia it once was. In addition to worrying about layoffs and the constant threat of AI, Meta workers will soon have all their mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes logged by the company. What's likely to further annoy workers is the purpose for these keyloggers: to train Meta's AI agents so they can perform work tasks. A new tool called Model Capability Initiative (MCI) will run on work-related apps and also take occasional snapshots of workers' screens, according to internal memos seen by Reuters. The memos add that MCI will improve Meta's AI models in areas where they struggle to replicate ways that humans interact with computers, such as choosing dropdown-menu options and using keyboard shortcuts. A Meta spokesman told the BBC: "If we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them." Zuckerberg's AI glasses showing him how many employees can be replaced by AI The spokesman added that the data is not used for any other purposes, that the tool has safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and that the information gathered won't be used for evaluation purposes. Now that Mark Zuckerberg's obsession with the metaverse that led to him changing Facebook's corporate name to Meta is over, the social media giant is going all-in on AI. Like other big tech companies, the embrace of automation has led to thousands of job losses recently. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told employees that the increase in internal data collection was part of Meta's "AI for Work" efforts, which have now been rebranded as Agent Transformation Accelerator (ATA). Bosworth added that Meta's ultimate vision was for its agents to primarily do the work while humans direct, review, and help improve them. The executive never mentioned how this might affect the number of workers Meta requires, but it certainly sounds like a way of reducing its headcount. Meta is planning to lay off a massive 10% of its workforce starting on May 20, meaning around 8,000 people will be losing their jobs - the company has already laid off around 2,000 people this year. It's also considering making large additional cuts later this year. Illustrating the AI problem is a website listing all of Meta's current openings: there were 800 job listings in March. Today, there are seven. Employee responses to news that everything they do will be recorded to train an AI that could replace them have been pretty much what you'd expect. One worker who asked not to be named called it "very dystopian." "This company has become obsessed with AI," they told the BBC. Another person who recently left Meta said the tool is just the latest way that it's "shoving AI down everyone's throat," which could describe the industry as a whole right now. Not every company is following Meta and shoehorning AI into every aspect of its workflow. Duolingo recently stopped evaluating workers based on how much they use the technology. It's a metric that many others, including Meta, have introduced.

Meta to track workers' clicks and keystrokes to train AI

Meta will start tracking the way employees work, including their keystrokes and mouse clicks, to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models. The company, which owns Instagram and Facebook, told workers on Tuesday that a new tool will run on Meta's computers and internal apps, logging their activity to be used as training data for AI technology. A Meta spokesman told the BBC: "If we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them." "The data is not used for any other purpose," he said, adding that the tool has "safeguards in place to protect sensitive content". But one Meta employee, who asked not to be identified, said having their smallest actions on a computer being used to train AI model as workers expect a slew of additional job cuts feels "very dystopian". "This company has become obsessed with AI," they told the BBC.. Another person who recently left the company said the tracking tool is "just the latest way they're shoving AI down everyone's throat". Meta has already laid off around 2,000 employees this year in smaller rounds of cuts, but employees have been expecting deeper job losses in the coming months, as the BBC previously reported. Last month, the company enacted a partial hiring freeze which now appears to be more far-reaching. A website that Meta uses to advertise all of its jobs hosted about 800 listings in March. Now, it is advertising just seven jobs. Meta spokesman's declined to comment on the company's removal of job listings or plans for cuts. Meta is using a tracking tool called Model Capability Initiative or MCI, according to Reuters which first reported the move. The BBC has been told that an employee's activity on a Meta computer would have been accessible to the company before, however tracking and logging specifically for the purpose of training and improving AI tools is new. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's co-founder and chief executive, recently pledged to ramp up spending on AI projects this year and is attempting to position the firm at the forefront of the technology. Meta plans to spend roughly $140bn on AI in 2026, almost double the amount it invested in the technology a year ago. In 2025, it effectively acquired Scale AI for more than $14bn (£10.3bn), and brought the executives of the data-labeling firm into Meta to help it build out its AI models and tools. The first significant launch from the company's reformed Meta Superintelligence Labs group emerged last month with the AI model Muse Spark. With the data gathered from the new employee tracker, Meta is hoping to train new AI models that will come out of the lab. In January, Zuckerberg said that 2026 will be "the year that AI dramatically changes the way we work". "We're starting to see projects that used to take big teams now be accomplished by a single, very talented person," he said at the time.

Meta is installing tracking software on US employees' computers

The move, disclosed in an internal memo seen by Reuters, is framed as a way to teach AI agents how humans navigate software. Critics say it is workplace surveillance under a different name. Meta is installing new tracking software on US-based employees' work computers to capture mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and occasional screenshots, which will be fed into the company's AI model training pipeline, Reuters has reported. The tool, called the Model Capability Initiative, was disclosed to staff this week in a memo distributed via a channel belonging to the Meta Superintelligence Labs team. According to Reuters, which saw the memo, it will run on a designated list of work apps and websites. Staff were told they can "do their part to help by just doing their daily work." Meta's stated rationale is that building agents capable of navigating software on behalf of users requires training data drawn from actual human computer use, specifically the micro-behaviours, such as navigating dropdown menus and using keyboard shortcuts, that AI models struggle to replicate from general web data alone. "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," a Meta spokesperson said. The company added that safeguards are in place to protect sensitive content and that the data will not be used for any purpose other than model training. The memo reportedly framed the effort as part of Meta's "AI for Work" programme, which has been renamed the Agent Transformation Accelerator. The Superintelligence Labs division, which leads Meta's most ambitious AI research, is now led by Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI, the data-labelling firm in which Meta acquired a 49% stake for more than $14 billion last year. The connection is significant: Scale AI's core business is producing training data at industrial scale, and Wang's appointment signals that Meta is treating data collection as a core strategic competency rather than a procurement exercise. The move puts a blunt question about the labour relationship between AI companies and their employees into public view. For Meta workers, the dynamic is unusually direct: they are, in a literal sense, being asked to generate the training data that will teach AI agents to replicate their own computer-use behaviour. Meta is not the first company to mine internal workflows for AI training, in January, OpenAI was reported to be asking contractors to upload samples of real work products, but the combination of keystroke capture and screenshot collection represents a more systemic and automated approach. The company's assurance that the data will not be used for performance monitoring has been met with scepticism in public commentary, though no evidence has emerged that it is doing so. The tracking software will run only on a designated list of apps and websites, not across all computer activity. Meta has not disclosed which applications are included. The data collection appears to be limited to US employees at this stage; EU and UK data protection law would require explicit legal bases and potentially explicit consent for equivalent measures in those jurisdictions.

Meta Plans to Turn Its Employees' Clicks and Keystrokes into AI Training Data

Much has been made about the idea that workers are effectively training their own replacements when they work with AI tools, though most employers won't directly admit to it. Meta has apparently decided to drop all pretenses that isn't the case. According to a report from Reuters, the company recently sent a memo to employees informing them of new tracking software that will be installed on their computers to track mouse movements and keystrokes in order to help train AI agents to perform specific work tasks. Per the memo seen by Reuters, the surveillance tool (no reason to pretend it's anything but that) is called Model Capability Initiative, and it will record the screens of employees as they go about their work. In addition, the company will reportedly increase its internal data collection efforts as part of its AI for Work program, which has apparently been renamed the Agent Transformation Accelerator. All of that data will be used to train Meta's AI models to improve the functionality of its agents, which are meant to operate autonomously and navigate across multiple systems and programs. Per Reuters, Meta's current agent offerings reportedly struggle to perform certain actions that humans have no problem with, like selecting items from dropdown menus or using keyboard shortcuts. The new employee monitoring systems will help to refine those capabilities, which definitely should not raise any red flags for the employees of a company that is reportedly gearing up to lay off 10% of its workforce in the coming months. The pitch to employees is that their work won't change as a result of having persistent digital eyes on them. The company positioned the program as an opportunity for Meta employees to "help our models get better simply by doing their daily work," with a promise that the information would not be used for performance reviews or other potentially invasive purposes. It's hard to imagine that's a compelling case for employees, who don't really have any incentive to participate in such a program. They've added model training to their responsibilities without any apparent increase in compensation, and the new work requires them to surrender a sense of privacy that their work isn't being monitored. Meta is clearly all in on AI. The company has reportedly been building AI agents meant to work alongside employees, including one designed for CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and has created a Zuckerberg chatbot for employees to communicate with. Now workers are essentially being told they are training the systems that will replace them. Might be time to figure out how to poison the well.

'Simply by doing their daily work': Meta tracks staff activity to teach AI how to replace them

* Meta is recording employee clicks, keystrokes, and screen activity to train AI agents on real work behavior * The program is part of a broader push to build AI systems that can perform everyday tasks with minimal human input * The move comes just ahead of reports of layoffs at the company Meta has begun collecting everything its employees do as they go about their normal work to train its AI models, as first reported by Reuters. The Model Capability Initiative records mouse movements and clicks, keyboard keystrokes, and even occasional screenshots from computers used by Meta employees in the U.S. The company wants to observe how people actually use software, then feed that behavior into AI models so they can learn to do the same things. Meta essentially wants to make its systems more reliable for the small actions that define a workday. That means everything from navigating a menu and moving between windows to parsing different website formats. These aren't easily solved with text data alone. "This is where all Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work," the internal memo states. Training your own successor AI systems are moving from generating content to performing actions. They are being trained to complete tasks that have always required a person at a keyboard. That requires more examples than just a list of steps to complete a task. They need to see how work unfolds. Meta's approach is to capture those steps directly, turning everyday activity into training material. Workplace monitoring has long existed, but Meta's approach is more detailed and more specific in its purpose. The system records the fine-grained interactions that are usually overlooked, building a detailed picture of how tasks are completed in practice. According to the company, the data is not intended for performance evaluation, with safeguards in place to protect sensitive information. The tracking program sits within a broader push at Meta to develop AI agents capable of handling everyday tasks. This Agent Transformation Accelerator focuses on building AI models for routine work across different tools and platforms. The timing of the rollout is difficult to separate from other changes at the company. Meta is preparing to lay off around 10% of its global workforce, with more to follow. additional cuts expected later in the year. All-seeing AI eye Beyond how Meta plans to use the data, the level of detail the program is collecting is unusually comprehensive. Logging every keystroke and mouse movement is more familiar to factories and warehouses than corporate offices. It's a new level of visibility, and possibly an uncomfortably intrusive one for many. The fact that it's happening in the U.S. is not surprising. Companies here are generally required only to inform employees of the surveillance, whereas European labor and data privacy rules put much stricter limits on this kind of oversight. For Meta, the fact that need to be trained on examples of everyday tasks makes this monitor program the obvious move. Employees may feel less comfortable about having no choice but to expose every moment of their workday to observation and having that data used to potentially replace them and all of their coworkers. If Meta's program works like the company hopes, it's unlikely to remain unique to the company. The demand for real-world behavioral data will increase as AI capable of carrying out those tasks becomes more common. Meta wants to make AI models that can completely mimic what human employees do at work. Whether that leads to more efficient tools or just a more uncertain, and potentially depressed workplace depends on how those AI models are deployed, but there's no question that they will be watching every click soon. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.

Meta will track employee mouse movements and keystrokes, report says

Surveillance to train AI. Credit: Timon Schneider/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Meta is about to ramp up surveillance of its employees, Reuters reports, but in a very 2026 twist, it's not meant to catch people slacking off. Reuters reports that Meta is installing tracking software that can capture mouse movements and keystrokes on U.S.-based employees' computers. While this sort of surveillance isn't unheard of in corporate America, the motivation here is slightly novel: Meta is reportedly going to use the data to train AI agents, per a company memo seen by Reuters. This will be done through a tool called Model Capability Initiative, or MCI. Meta's memo said the idea is to help AI agents improve at tasks they currently struggle with, such as using keyboard shortcuts. And in a different memo reportedly sent to employees on Monday, CTO Andrew Bosworth said to expect more internal data collection in order to make agents better at replicating human work. The goal, per Bosworth, is for agents to do most of the work while humans sit back and monitor the situation. "The vision we are building towards is one where our agents primarily do the work and our role is to direct, review and help them improve," Bosworth said, per Reuters. While Meta did not explicitly say any of this was meant to replace human workers down the line, it's reasonable to wonder if that's where this is eventually going. Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs because of AI last year, and Meta has already laid off a quadruple-digit number of people (though those were unrelated to AI) earlier this year, with more cuts coming later in May. If, at some point in the future, Meta reduces its workforce with the aim of having AI agents do the work instead, it may have been those same Meta employees who trained the AI in the first place. In the meantime, Reuters reports that Meta assured employees that the data will not be used in performance reviews. Meta hasn't had a great year, privacy-wise, and we're only four months into 2026. In March, the company was accused of sending Meta Ray-Ban user recordings, including intimate images, to offshore Meta workers, also for AI training. Earlier this month, we reported on the case of a former Meta employee under criminal investigation for downloading private Facebook photos. And after a report that Meta was planning to add facial recognition technology into its smart glasses, a group of 70 organizations, including the ACLU, signed a public letter urging Meta to reverse course.

Meta's latest surveillance plans are so dystopian that I am out of words

Meta wants to watch employees' every click, keystroke, and mouse move, and their job might just depend on it. I have been covering tech for years now, and I have seen companies do some questionable things in the name of innovation. But Meta's latest move might just take the cake. According to a Reuters report, Meta is installing tracking software on its employees' work computers. The tool, called Model Capability Initiative (MCI), will log mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes. It will also take occasional screenshots of employees' screens. Recommended Videos The reason? Meta says its AI struggles to replicate the way humans interact with computers. It seems that Meta wants to compete with the likes of Claude Cowork and Perplexity Computer, but is unable to crack the technical challenges. And apparently, the best way to fix that is to silently harvest data from every employee, every day, as they go about their work. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said the goal is to build AI agents that "primarily do the work" while employees simply "direct, review, and help them improve." Essentially, Meta wants you to train your own replacement while sitting at your desk. Is this even legal? In the United States, it is. There are no federal laws that prevent employers from monitoring employees at this level. Companies are only required, in some states, to broadly inform workers that they are being monitored. That's it. In Europe, it's a different story. Such monitoring would likely violate the General Data Protection Regulation. Countries like Italy have outright bans on this type of electronic tracking, and German courts allow keystroke logging only in exceptional circumstances. So it seems that Meta's European employees are currently safe from such an authoritarian policy, but its employees in the United States are not so lucky. Meta is essentially doing something in the United States that is almost illegal in other parts of the developed world. Are workers okay with this? Unsurprisingly, no. And this isn't just a Meta problem. In China, a very similar situation is unfolding. According to an MIT Technology report, bosses are directing workers to meticulously document their workflows so that AI agents can eventually replace them. Some workers have started pushing back. One AI product manager built a tool that rewrites worker manuals into language that is too vague and non-actionable for an AI agent to follow. Why Meta's approach seems far more egregious Meta's move is especially egregious because it's not even asking employees to document anything. It's just watching everything. Every click, every keystroke, every screenshot taken without asking. The data won't be used to evaluate performance, according to the company. But forgive me if I find that hard to believe when Meta is also planning to lay off 10% of its global workforce next month. And that's just the first round of layoffs. Who knows how many more employees will receive the dreaded 6 AM emails informing them that their jobs no longer exist? I understand that AI is changing how companies operate. I get it. But there is a stark difference between using AI to make workers more efficient and surveilling workers to make AI capable enough to eliminate them. Meta appears to have crossed that line without blinking.

Meta Installing Software on Employee Computers to Track Everything They Do, Feed the Data to AI

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech As if activity-monitoring software installed on your work computer that snitches on you if you're away from the keyboard for too long wasn't enough, Meta is taking the trend to its logical -- and dystopian surveillance state-level -- conclusion. As Reuters reports, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company is installing new tracking software on all of its US-based employees' computers that tracks all of their mouse movements and keystrokes, data that will be used for training the company's AI models. The company is reportedly looking to develop AI agents that can complete work tasks autonomously, in perhaps one of the more conspicuous efforts to automate human workers's jobs we've come across as of late. Besides the ethical concerns of forcing employees to train their AI replacements, the news also raises thorny questions regarding data privacy. Meta, in particular, has garnered an incredibly poor reputation when it comes to protecting personal data. According to an internal memo obtained by Reuters, the software is called "Model Capability Initiative" and will run on work-related apps and websites. It will even take occasional screenshots. The goal is to guide Meta's AI models to essentially replicate the way humans interact with computers, like using dropdown menus or making use of keyboard shortcuts. "This is where all Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work," the memo reads, as quoted by Reuters. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told Reuters that the company is looking to implement safeguards to protect "sensitive content," but didn't elaborate any further. While tracking employees' keystrokes and mouse movement would likely be against European law, Yale University law professor Ifeoma Ajunwa told Reuters that "there is no limit on worker surveillance" in the US on a federal level. Beyond tracking their employees' every move, Meta is also planning to slash ten percent of its workforce across the globe starting next month -- only the first of several planned cuts later this year.

Meta will start tracking employees' screens and keystrokes to train AI tools | Fortune

The tool, disclosed in a memo to staff this week in a channel belonging to the Meta Superintelligence Labs team, which Reuters saw, will run on a designated list of work apps and websites. Per Reuters, the memo framed the effort as a way for rank-and-file employees to improve company models in areas where they struggle to emulate basic computer-use behaviors, such as navigating dropdown menus and using keyboard shortcuts. The memo told Meta staffers that they can do their part to help by just doing their daily work. The broader goal seems to be to build AI agents capable of performing white-collar tasks on their own, the exact software Meta is racing to ship out amid competition from OpenAI and Anthropic. Those agents have a lot of data, but little footage of how to actually use it. "If we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them," a Meta spokesperson wrote in an email to Fortune, adding that the models were using "things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus." The company added that safeguards are in place to protect sensitive content and that the data will not be used for any other purpose. The move comes as the industry hunts for training data to use in the workplace itself. In January, OpenAI was reported to be asking third-party contractors, via training data firm Handshake AI, to upload samples of real work products from previous jobs -- actual PowerPoints, spreadsheets, and the like -- with instructions to scrub confidential material before submission. Meta acquired a 49% stake in data-labeling firm Scale AI last year for more than $14 billion, and Scale's former CEO, Alexandr Wang, now leads Meta Superintelligence Labs. Meta has rapidly accelerated its AI spending, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg committing up to $135 billion in capital expenditure for 2026. At the same time, the company is preparing to cut as much as 20% of its workforce, with the first layoffs reportedly set to begin in May.

Meta to track employee activity such as clicks to train its AI, report

Most users know that platforms such as Instagram track their behaviour and preferences to train algorithms. Now, employees of the company behind Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp are subject to a similar kind of tracking, used to feed the development of AI systems. According to Reuters, the global tech company is set to capture workers' mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes. In some cases, it might even take snapshots of what is displayed on their screens. The software doing this is called Model Capability Initiative (MCI). It runs on a specific list of websites and workapps and basically transforms the employees' daily behaviour into training data for Meta's AI models. A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch the company needs real examples of how people use computers. CNBC reported that among the several hundred websites on this list are Google, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Slack and GitHub. According to the reports, the software is installed on US-based employees - who do not have the option to opt out. But Meta told its workforce, according to the memos quoted by Reuters, that data gathered through the system would not be used for employee performance evaluations or any purpose other than AI training. The reported use of employee activity as training data shows how workplace behaviour is becoming part of AI development. It raises questions about where productivity ends and monitoring begins.

Would you quit? Meta will put keyloggers on employee PCs for AI training

Meta is also planning more layoffs as it spends billions on AI. It's best to assume that nothing you do on a work-issued PC is private. But is there no limit? No breaking point where people start throwing their laptops out of windows and joining Watch Dogs-esque hacktivist groups? Meta sure seems to be looking for it. Reuters reports that the Facebook, VR, and now AI company will track US-based employees' "mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes" on "work-related apps and websites" for the purpose of AI training. It will also take screenshots, according to the report. A Meta spokesperson told Reuters that the company will somehow exclude "sensitive content" and won't use the data for performance evaluations. Rather, their AI models "need real examples" of people using computers for everyday tasks in order to automate them. If I were a Meta employee, I'd take this to mean that the company thinks I can be replaced by a robot that I was forced to train. Meta has pledged to spend $600 billion on AI by 2028, and according to another Reuters report, plans to lay off nearly 8,000 employees in May. The mood inside Meta has been "horrid" in recent years, according to Ed Zitron, an AI industry critic who reports on what he's called "the most annoying bubble in history" in his Where's Your Ed At newsletter. Zitron's impression from sources inside the company is that there exists a "culture of paranoia," which an AI-training keylogger won't likely improve. "Everyone I know at Meta hates working there," Zitron told PC Gamer on a call today. Meta introduced a new AI model, Muse Spark, earlier in April, and claims that it's a step toward "superintelligence," a buzzword the AI industry has been bandying about for years now. A Meta executive acknowledged to Bloomberg that the model performs worse than competitor models at some tasks, but said that it's "early," and that the company has bigger LLMs in development. In its report, Reuters notes that Meta's keylogging initiative likely targets US employees because laws related to employee surveillance are stricter in Europe.

Meta tracking employee keystrokes to train AI is probably legal. Experts say that doesn't make it ethical

Employees at Meta Platforms may soon feel like they're spilling TMI to their employer's MCI. The parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp is installing new software -- reportedly dubbed Model Capability Initiative (MCI) -- on its employees' computers and workstations that will, among other things, track and capture mouse movements and keystrokes in an effort to train AI models, Reuters first reported on Tuesday. It's all part of a broader effort to develop autonomous AI agents that can perform specific work tasks. A Meta spokesperson confirmed that the company was, indeed, pushing forward with the measure.

Meta to train AI using employee mouse and keyboard data

Meta will utilize data from its employees' mouse movements and keystrokes to enhance its AI models, Reuters reports. This initiative aims to develop more capable and efficient artificial intelligence. The decision reflects a growing trend among technology companies seeking unconventional sources of training data, which are crucial for improving AI performance. The move raises significant questions regarding data privacy and employee consent. A Meta spokesperson stated, "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." Meta will launch an internal tool designed to collect these inputs from certain applications to aid its AI training efforts. The company confirmed that it has implemented safeguards to protect sensitive content and emphasized that the collected data will not be used for any other purpose. This trend underscores emerging privacy issues within the AI industry. Recently, reports indicated that older startups are being repurposed for their corporate communications, such as Slack and Jira archives, to create additional training data for AI models.

Meta to start recording employee mouse and keyboard actions for AI

TL;DR: Meta is implementing tracking software on employee computers to record mouse movements, keystrokes, and screenshots as part of its Model Capability Initiative, aiming to train AI agents to perform tasks autonomously. This move may lead to significant workforce reductions amid planned layoffs. A new and potentially explosive report from Reuters claims that Meta is installing tracking software on all its employees' computers to log mouse movements and keyboard keystrokes. According to the report, this is part of a new "broader initiative" to overhaul the company's workforce by training and building AI agents that can "perform work tasks autonomously." The report notes that it has seen the internal memos from Meta regarding this, which is being called the Model Capability Initiative (MCI). Apparently, it will run on all work-related apps and websites, and will even take screenshots of employees' displays. According to one of the internal memos, the purpose of the new initiative is to accelerate AI model training in areas where they struggle. This includes choosing options from dropdown menus and using keyboard shortcuts. "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," Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said. "The vision we are building towards is one where our agents primarily do the work and our role is to direct, review, and help them improve," Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told employees. According to the report, there's currently no limit on worker surveillance in the United States, so the legalities surrounding this initiative are sound. As for what this means for the future of Meta, it's not a stretch to see how this could lead to further mass layoffs at the company, with employees essentially 'training' their AI Agent replacements by simply doing their work. And with that, this new report arrives less than a week after another story claiming Meta plans to lay off 10% of its global workforce, starting on May 20, with further similarly large cuts coming later in the year.

'This Makes Me Super Uncomfortable': Meta's Plan to Track Employees' Every Click and Keystroke Sparks Backlash

Employees have reacted with discomfort and concern, but Meta says employee activity on company machines has been monitored in some capacity for years. Meta is rolling out a sweeping new program that turns everyday employee computer activity into AI training data -- and it has already been met with internal backlash. Meta is installing tracking software on U.S.-based employees' work computers to record how they use common work apps throughout the day, per Reuters. According to internal memos, the tool, called Model Capability Initiative (MCI), logs mouse movements, click locations and keystrokes. It also monitors how workers navigate software, including keyboard shortcuts and dropdown menus, and takes periodic screenshots or "screen content" to give the AI context for what's happening on the screen. Meta is rolling out MCI to U.S.-based full‑time employees and contingent workers. Staff will see a pop‑up on their work laptop asking them to enable the tool, which then runs on a pre‑approved list of work‑related apps and websites such as Gmail, Google Chat, Metamate (Meta's internal AI assistant) and development tools like VS Code. Meta will limit MCI monitoring to company devices and not track employees' phones, the company said. It also stressed that it collects data "solely" to train AI models, not for performance evaluation. The program plays into Meta's broader push to build powerful AI agents that can autonomously perform office tasks. The company recently created Meta Superintelligence Labs, a team of researchers and engineers dedicated to developing AI, as part of an overall AI effort. In memos viewed by Reuters, Meta stated that current AI systems remain clumsy at some of the mundane but essential behaviors of knowledge work. This includes activities like selecting the right option from a dropdown menu, using keyboard shortcuts efficiently and moving between multiple windows and apps to complete a task. To fix that, executives said the models need "real examples" of how humans actually use computers in the flow of work. By turning the daily activity of tens of thousands of employees into training data, Meta hopes to sharpen its internal AI agents so they can eventually perform end‑to‑end tasks on behalf of workers, per Reuters. The company also wants to gain an edge in the race with rivals like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft, all of whom are trying to create AI assistants for workplace tasks. Inside Meta, the announcement has triggered visible discomfort and skepticism, as internal reaction threads obtained by Business Insider show. On Meta's internal communications platform, the top‑rated comment under the rollout post read: "This makes me super uncomfortable. How do we opt out?" Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth responded that "there is no option to opt out of this on your work provided laptop," a message that drew crying, shocked and angry emoji reactions. Meta told Business Insider that it will have safeguards to protect sensitive content and not use the data for any other purpose besides training AI. A source also noted that the company has monitored employee activity on company machines in some capacity for years.

Screenshots, mouse tracking: Meta is now watching every click his employees make, and workers are calling it creepy

Meta is using a new tool to track employee activity like typing, clicks, and screen actions to train its AI systems. The company wants AI to learn real work tasks and improve automation. While Meta says there are safety steps, many workers feel uncomfortable and fear job loss as the company increases AI use and investment. Meta is planning to track everything employees do on their computers, like typing and mouse clicks. The company has built a new tool called Model Capability Initiative (MCI) that will run on office computers and apps to collect data while employees work. This tool will record keystrokes, mouse movements, and even take screenshots of employees' screens to see exactly what they are doing. The collected data will be used to train Meta's new AI models so they can learn how humans use computers. The plan was shared with employees through an internal memo sent on Tuesday, which was later seen by Reuters. The memo said employees can help improve AI "simply by doing their daily work," meaning normal tasks will train the system. Meta's main goal is to teach AI how to do simple computer tasks like clicking menus and using keyboard shortcuts, which AI still struggles with, as noted by Daily Mail. This move is part of Meta's bigger push to expand its AI systems and use them across the company. Internally, workers are already being pushed to use AI tools in their jobs, even if it slows them down at first. Meta's Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth said the company will speed up work on "AI for work" in another internal memo . He explained the long-term vision is that AI agents will do most of the work, while humans will just guide and review them. He also said AI will eventually learn from human corrections and improve automatically over time. Meta defended the tracking system, saying AI needs real examples of how people use computers, like clicking and navigating menus. A company spokesperson said the tool will only collect data from certain apps and will include safeguards to protect sensitive information. Meta also claimed this data will not be used to judge employee performance. Despite this, many employees feel uncomfortable and think the system is too intrusive. One employee told the BBC that the plan feels "very dystopian" and said Meta is becoming obsessed with AI, as per Daily Mail. Workers are worried their actions are being used to train AI systems that might replace them in the future. A former employee said the tool feels like "another way AI is being forced on everyone", as stated by Daily Mail. Concerns are growing about workplace surveillance increasing inside the company. Tom Hegarty from Foxglove said Meta moderators have already faced heavy monitoring at work. He added that workers in countries like Ghana have reported being watched constantly during shifts. He warned that this kind of monitoring now seems to be expanding to all Meta employees globally, as noted by Daily Mail. Jake Hufurt from Big Brother Watch said companies should limit employee monitoring and not overdo it. He also said employers should not treat workers like "guinea pigs" just to collect data for AI. These concerns come at a time when layoffs are also happening at Meta. The company has already cut around 2,000 jobs this year. Meta is also planning to reduce its global workforce by about 10% starting in May. At the same time, the company is spending huge money on AI development. Last year, Meta spent about $14 billion to buy a major stake in AI company Scale AI and hired top talent. The company is offering extremely high salaries to AI engineers, sometimes worth hundreds of millions. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this year that AI will massively change how people work. Meta now plans to spend about $140 billion on AI in 2026, which is almost double its 2025 spending, as cited by Daily Mail. The company is even working on creating an AI version of Zuckerberg to interact with employees. Meta is also building advanced 3D AI characters that can talk to people in real time. Sources say engineers are being told to focus on building Zuckerberg's AI clone as a priority. Overall, Meta's new tracking system shows how far the company is going to push AI, but it is also raising serious fears among employees about privacy and job safety. Q1. Why is Meta tracking employees' clicks and screens? Meta is collecting this data to train its AI so it can learn how people use computers and do tasks better. Q2. Will Meta use this tracking data to judge employee performance? Meta says the data will not be used for performance reviews, but employees are still worried about privacy and job risks.

Meta starts recording employee mouse and keyboard actions for AI training

AI is everywhere, but it needs real people's actions and work as material to train itself. According to Tweak Town and reported by Reuters, Meta is installing tracking software on all its employees' computers to log mouse movements and keyboard keystrokes. The idea is to train and build AI agents that can "perform work tasks autonomously", and especially to accelerate AI model training in areas where they struggle. This Model Capability Initiative (MCI) will apparently run on all work-related apps and websites, but that's not all. It will also take screenshots of employees' displays. Of course this is being portrayed as a positive thing, which can be seen in a statement from Meta's spokesperson Andy Stone. "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." And what happens, when it is decided, that the AI model is ready? Is that the time to lay off people, who helped to train that AI model? We shall have to wait and see.

Meta to capture U.S. employee mouse movements and keystrokes to train AI

Meta is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees' computers to capture mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes for use in training its artificial intelligence models, part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, the company told staffers in internal memos. The tool, called Model Capability Initiative (MCI), will run on work-related apps and websites and will also take occasional snapshots of the content on employees' screens, according to one of the memos, posted by a staff AI research scientist on Tuesday in a channel for the company's model-building Meta SuperIntelligence Labs team. The purpose, according to the memo, was to improve the company's AI models in areas where they struggle to replicate how humans interact with computers, like choosing from dropdown menus and using keyboard shortcuts.

Meta Plans To Log Employee Keystrokes For Training Workplace AI Agents: Report - Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO),

How Meta Intends To Turn Daily Work Into AI Training Reuters reported that Meta is rolling out a tool called Model Capability Initiative, or MCI, that runs across work apps and websites while recording clicks, cursor movement, and typing. One internal memo said the system can also capture periodic screenshots, with the goal of improving areas where models still stumble on routine computer behavior such as navigating dropdowns or using keyboard shortcuts. The memo framed the effort as a way for staff to contribute training examples simply by doing their normal jobs, rather than creating separate labeling workflows. In a separate message shared on Monday, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth described a broader internal program now labeled Agent Transformation Accelerator, built around AI agents doing more of the work while employees supervise and refine outcomes. Safeguards, Limits, And A Growing Surveillance Debate Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the MCI data is intended only for model training and not for employee evaluation, while also pointing to protections meant to keep sensitive information out of the pipeline. As reported by Reuters, Yale law professor Ifeoma Ajunwa warned that logging keystrokes can push white-collar monitoring toward a level of continuous oversight more commonly associated with gig-economy roles. Outside the U.S., legal constraints could be tougher, according to Reuters, which cited York University professor Valerio De Stefano on how European privacy and labor rules may restrict or bar this kind of tracking. De Stefano also said the mere knowledge of monitoring can tilt workplace leverage toward employers, even before any data is used. Why Custom Chips Matter For Meta's Agent Ambitions Meta's internal data collection drive is paired with a hardware strategy built for long-run AI capacity, including a multi-year expansion with Broadcom to design custom silicon tailored to Meta's workloads. That kind of contracted, purpose-built chip pipeline is a departure from buying only off-the-shelf parts, and it can make AI spending look more like an ongoing infrastructure commitment than a series of one-time orders. The same dynamic has been pitched as a stabilizer for chip suppliers, since long-duration agreements can provide visibility that historically was hard to find in boom-and-bust semiconductor cycles. META Price Action: Meta Platforms shares were down 0.31% during regular trading and up 0.45% in after-hours trading on Tuesday, last trading at $671.85, according to Benzinga Pro data. Image: Shutterstock This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training data - The Economic Times

Meta is installing new tracking software on US-based employees' computers to capture mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes for use in training its artificial-intelligence models, part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, ⁠the ⁠company told staffers in internal memos seen by Reuters. The tool will run on a list of work-related apps and websites and will also take occasional snapshots of the content on employees' screens for context, according to one memo, posted by a staff AI research scientist on Tuesday in a dedicated ⁠internal channel for the company's model-building Meta SuperIntelligence Labs team. The purpose of the exercise, according to the memo, was ⁠to improve the company's models in areas where they still struggle, like choosing from dropdown menus and using keyboard shortcuts. "This is where all Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work," it said. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the data collected would not be used for performance assessments or any other purpose besides model training and that safeguards were in place to protect sensitive content. "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," said Stone.

Meta's Mandatory Keystroke Tracker Fuels Workplace Trust Crisis

What began as a tool to boost productivity is now raising privacy fears. Employees at Meta platforms question constant monitoring designed to help build smarter artificial intelligence systems. Meta employees are not happy and the reason is sitting quietly on their work computers. A new tracking tool records keystrokes, clicks and screen activity every day with one stated goal, training better AI. Workers were not even asked before this move was implemented. The software was installed automatically and when staff asked to opt out the answer was no. This single response changed everything. What the company framed as a productivity tool quickly became a flashpoint over privacy and trust. The discomfort runs deeper than the software itself. Employees have started to ask whether they are doing their jobs or feeding a system that may one day do it for them. This tension is not unique to Meta. Across the tech industry, the race to build smarter AI is quietly running into a wall built by the very people powering it.

Meta workers outraged over internal software tracking keystrokes, mouse movements

Meta employees are fuming over a new internal tool that tracks their clicks and keystrokes -- the latest flashpoint in the company's all-in push on artificial intelligence. Staffers reacted with alarm after learning the software would monitor mouse movements, typing and on-screen activity to help train Meta's AI systems, according to internal communications viewed by Business Insider. One employee wrote, "This makes me super uncomfortable. How do we opt out?" -- a comment that quickly became the top response, as others flooded the thread with angry reactions, including a wave of "angry face" emojis. Employees were reacting to a new internal program first reported by Reuters, which said Meta would train its AI systems by analyzing keystrokes and mouse movements on workers' computers. Executives told workers there would be no option to opt out on company-issued devices, while Meta said the program includes safeguards and is limited to work-related applications. The backlash comes as Meta ramps up a sweeping -- and costly -- overhaul of its AI strategy, pouring billions into infrastructure, talent and new products in a bid to catch up with rivals like OpenAI and Google. Meta is also reported to be on the verge of slashing its workforce, with the company planning to cut about 10% of its global staff -- or roughly 8,000 workers -- starting May 20 and potentially more later this year as it pivots toward AI-driven roles. The layoffs are part of a broader effort to reshape the company around artificial intelligence, with executives pushing to automate tasks previously handled by human workers, according to Reuters. "There are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and the data is not used for any other purpose," a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider. The tracking tool -- known internally as the Model Capability Initiative -- captures employees' mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes while they work, and can also take periodic snapshots of what's on their screens, according to internal memos cited by Reuters. The software runs only on work-related applications and websites, with the goal of collecting real-world data on how people actually use computers. Meta says the data will be used to train AI systems to better mimic everyday human behavior -- such as navigating menus, using keyboard shortcuts and completing routine digital tasks -- areas where current models still struggle. The company has said the information won't be used for employee performance reviews and that safeguards are in place to protect sensitive content, though the initiative is part of a broader push to build AI agents capable of handling work tasks autonomously. Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that Meta staffers will have the option of chatting with a virtual AI-powered clone of CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Meta to track employee keystrokes to train AI models, Reuters reports By Investing.com

Investing.com -- Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) is installing tracking software on U.S.-based employees' computers to capture mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes for artificial intelligence training data, according to internal memos seen by Reuters. The tool, called Model Capability Initiative (MCI), will monitor a list of work-related apps and websites and take occasional snapshots of screen content, according to a memo posted Tuesday by a staff AI research scientist in a channel for the company's Meta SuperIntelligence Labs team. The company said the data will be used to train AI models to perform work tasks autonomously, focusing on areas where the technology struggles to replicate human computer interactions, such as selecting from dropdown menus and using keyboard shortcuts. "This is where all Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work," the memo said. The announcement follows a Monday memo from Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, who told employees the company would increase internal data collection as part of its AI for Work (AI4W) efforts. This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.

Meta leverages employee activity to train its AI models

Meta has implemented an internal system designed to collect the digital interactions of its US employees to refine its artificial intelligence models. Dubbed the Model Capability Initiative, this software records mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes, while periodically capturing screenshots within professional applications. This aims to enable AI systems to better replicate human behavior in the daily use of digital tools. This initiative is part of a broader strategy to develop autonomous agents capable of executing professional tasks. Grouped under the Agent Transformation Accelerator program, these efforts aim to automate an increasing portion of the workload, with employees expected to supervise and improve these systems. Meta asserts that the collected data will not be used for individual performance evaluations, while acknowledging the necessity of protecting sensitive information. Concurrently, the group is accelerating its internal transformation around artificial intelligence, involving a reorganization of teams and potential workforce reductions of up to 10% from May. This shift is raising concerns regarding the intensification of workplace surveillance. While such practices are relatively unregulated in the United States, they would be strictly limited in Europe, particularly in light of stringent data protection regulations.

This makes me really uncomfortable, is there a way to opt out: Meta employee on mandatory keystroke tracking to train AI

Meta says it's for AI improvement, but fears of automation remain. Meta has recently told employees in the United States that it may begin tracking their keystrokes to help train future artificial intelligence tools. The company says this data could show how people work and improve its systems. However, a new report suggests the idea has raised concerns among staff and is meeting growing resistance. Many employees feel uneasy about being closely monitored during their daily tasks. They also worry that patterns from their own work could be used to build systems that might later replace parts of their roles. The current situation has created a rising tension between company goals and employee trust, while management defends the plan, stating that it's necessary for innovation. As reported earlier today, the tool is known as 'Model Capability' and is used to record keystrokes, mouse movements, clicks, and screen activity of the employees as they carry out their daily tasks. Moreover, this data will later be used to train AI models to better mimic human behaviour on computers. The company says that the idea is simple: if AI can observe how people complete real tasks, it can learn to do them more efficiently. Also read: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman takes dig at Anthropic Mythos AI, calls it fear-based marketing While the company is aiming to further expand its AI push and grab a huge leap in the AI sector, the rollout has not been welcomed by everyone. Internal discussions show that several employees are uncomfortable with the level of monitoring. One of the most common concerns raised by the employees was whether there is any option to opt out of this programme. However, the company leadership has confirmed that there is no such choice for work-issued devices and the keylogger will be installed for everyone in the company irrespective of their designation. This has further added to the unease of the employees as reactions from them included frustration and concern about privacy. Meta, on the other hand, defended the initiative by saying that similar monitoring has existed before and that this is only an extension of current practices. The company also said there are safeguards in place and that the collected data will only be used to improve AI systems and will not be used for other purposes, silently hinting about the evaluation. Also read: Anthropic investigates alleged unauthorised access to its Mythos AI model: Here is what happened It's also said that the tracking tool is limited in scope, as it works only within certain approved applications like email, chat tools, and coding platforms. Furthermore, it does not track activity on personal phones. Still, for many employees, the issue goes beyond where tracking happens. There is a bigger worry that these efforts could make automation happen faster at work, as by helping AI learn quickly, employees feel they might be digging up their own grave. Moreover, it also points to a larger problem in the tech industry, where improving AI often brings concerns about how it will affect workers.

Meta will closely watch employee keystrokes for AI training amid layoff speculations: All details

Meta is pushing more AI use and planning layoffs as it shifts toward automation. Meta is one of the firms which are actively expanding their presence in the AI space. Whether it be by building new data centres, training talent, or improving its existing tools. According to a recent report, the company is now turning inward as it looks to train future AI systems using internal data. The report claims Meta has informed its US-based employees that their everyday computer activity may soon be monitored. Company executives say the goal is to train upcoming AI tools and help them understand how people actually work on screen, allowing systems to better reflect real-world workflows and improve productivity insights. This approach raises concerns about employee privacy and oversight. Reuters recently reported that in internal communications Meta disclosed to its employees that they plan to roll out a tracking system called the Model Capability Initiative. This software will monitor mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes across work-related apps and websites. Moreover, it would also take occasional screenshots of the screen. The company says this data will help it to improve its AI models, especially in areas where machines struggle to copy human behaviour, such as navigating menus or using shortcuts. Also read: After Tim Cook, what is next for Apple? New CEO, new products and what happens to him Meta has also clarified that the collected data will be used only for training AI systems and not for evaluating employee performance. Still, the idea of continuous monitoring has raised concerns about workplace surveillance, particularly as such practices are more commonly linked with gig workers than office staff. The leadership at Meta has also outlined a vision where AI handles most of the work of its human counterpart, while the humans just guide and refine the outcomes from AI. The company is also encouraging staff to rely more on AI tools, even if it affects short-term productivity. Also read: Anthropic investigates alleged unauthorised access to its Mythos AI model: Here is what happened At the same time, Meta is reportedly planning major layoffs that could affect thousands of employees. The job cuts are likely to start in May, with more cuts possibly happening later. This is part of the company's plan to become smaller and more efficient, with fewer traditional jobs and more work done using AI. Aside from that, Meta is also testing advanced AI systems, which include an AI version of its CEO to make its employees feel more connected to the CEO and new AI models to improve what it can do.