• Meta previously announced it will cut 10% of its staff next month.
• Meta's HR chief told staff in a meeting that she can't promise further layoffs won't happen.
• She added that the business is strong and acknowledged that morale has been affected at Meta.

Meta plans to lay off around 10% of its staff next month, and it told staff it's not ruling out deeper cuts.

That's what Janelle Gale, Meta's chief people officer, told employees in an internal meeting on Thursday, according to three sources on the call.

"Will there be more layoffs? The question always comes up. I'd love to say that there are no more layoffs, but I can't say something we can't deliver," Gale said during the meeting. "While the business is strong, priorities change, competition is fierce, and we will continue to manage our costs responsibly."

She said this means that Meta will "continue to evolve teams as needed" and "try to redeploy talent." She pointed to how Meta is investing in its Applied AI organization.

Gale added that some organizations would be more affected by layoffs than others, though she did not specify which.

Meta leaders also said during the meeting that AI token usage would not be considered as a factor for the layoffs.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also addressed the layoffs at the meeting, saying that AI automation is not the driving factor behind them. He said that AI has made small teams far more efficient.

During the call, Zuckerberg also addressed Meta's plan to monitor employees' keystrokes and mouse movements to improve its AI models. He said humans are not actually watching what the staff are doing and that this data is abstracted and used to improve AI.

Meta AI Chief Alexandr Wang also appeared at the meeting, sporting a camouflage-pattern T-shirt featuring multiple deer, according to a photo seen by Business Insider. During the Q&A, he praised Meta's latest AI prowess, notably the recent release of its Spark model.

Meta declined to comment for this article.

Reuters reported in March that Meta plans to cut about 20% of its total staff this year.

Given the looming layoffs, Gale said at the meeting that they hit morale at Meta, and the company tries to make tough situations like that "the best version possible." She added that Meta has tripled COBRA healthcare coverage to 18 months.

Meta CFO Susan Li previously said during its first quarter earnings call on Wednesday that she "doesn't really know" the ideal size of the company's head count, which runs at above 77,000. Meta announced that its infrastructure spend, largely for AI, is doubling this year, to a range of $125 billion to $145 billion.

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Inside Meta, employees are facing 28 days of uncertainty before layoffs hit.

• Meta told staff on Thursday that it planned to eliminate 10% of its workforce.
• Inside the company, employees are bracing for weeks of limbo as they wait to find out who will be cut.
• Meta employees responded internally with a mixture of questions, concerns, and jokes.

Welcome to "28 days of hell."

That's how one Meta employee characterized the tech giant's announcement that thousands of jobs will be cut on May 20. Employees flooded internal forums with similar posts, many of which were filled with anxiety, dark humor, and questions as they wait to learn who will be out of a job.

"How are you motivating yourself to work for the next 1 month with layoffs confirmed?" one person posted on the anonymous workplace app Blind, in a section just for Meta employees.

Someone else replied, "I'm motivating myself to do stuff that I can put on my resume for my next job lol."

In a memo sent to staff on Thursday, Meta said it shared some layoff details earlier than usual because the news had already leaked. The company plans to cut around 10% of employees next month and close 6,000 open roles.

"I know this leaves everyone with nearly a month of ambiguity, which is incredibly unsettling," wrote Meta's chief people officer Janelle Gale.

For some Meta employees, the fact that company leadership acknowledged layoffs brought some relief. The layoffs had been so widely discussed internally that the announcement helped ease some uncertainty, according to one employee who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter.

One of the top comments under Gale's internal Meta post was a picture of an elephant, a reference to leadership addressing the elephant in the room. Reuters first reported Meta was planning sweeping layoffs in March, and employees have been speculating on the extent of the cuts in the weeks since.

"elephant addressed!" commented another employee. Another posted a picture of an envelope that read: "Addressed to: "ELEPHANT."

Others said that having to wait almost a month to find out who would be affected created anxiety. One person posted that this was their first week at the company. "It might be goodbye for me," they wrote.

Another employee told Business Insider that the announcement added pressure for them to deliver results over the next month because it's unknown which teams will be affected by the cuts.

"I'm a little stressed about making impact in the next month," they said.

Despite a sense of added pressure, it's not the employee's first go-around with cuts at the company. The worker said they're going to continue working as usual, assuming the worst while trying to make the most of the next month as they wait for further updates.

"I assume I'm always two months away from being laid off, no matter what leadership says, so I'm going to continue to operate as usual," the employee said.

Employees also commented on Gale's internal post with questions.

One person asked if Meta staff would receive their August 15 stock payouts, which are part of some employees' compensation packages. Gale said that impacted employees would have a termination date prior to the August vest and would therefore not receive it.

"Because of the timing of the notifications, we will have just had the May 15 vest. There are some instances, based on work location, where people will remain employed through the August 15 vest," Gale wrote. Another employee thanked Gale for the clarification.

Another employee asked if travel would be restricted the week of May 20. "We are not restricting travel company-wide. VPs will share team-specific guidance," Gale responded.

'I feel more anxious about surviving'

On the Meta employee section of Blind, some users asked why Meta couldn't offer voluntary buyouts. Microsoft on Thursday offered one-time early retirement buyouts to thousands of its long-time employees, and Google has extended the same offers to staff across some orgs.

Many posts were from users asking others for information about which groups might be affected.

In a longer post, one user said the downside might be surviving the cuts.

"I feel more anxious about surviving this layoff," they wrote, recalling several rounds of layoffs at the company since 2022.

"Because we all know it's just gonna get worse for those of us who are left behind and have to absorb even more work, amongst other declining factors in this sad fearful company," they wrote.

• Meta has set goals for some employees on how much they should use AI.
• They include targets for using AI code assistants, agents, and other tools.
• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he wants the company to be "AI-native."

Mark Zuckerberg wants Meta to be "AI-native." An internal document shows one way the company's CEO plans to get there.

The company has set goals for how much some employees should use AI tools for tasks such as coding.

Meta employees created a document to collect information about these goals from across different organizations, according to a copy seen by Business Insider. It includes goals set late last year and for 2026.

Tech companies are using various methods to motivate staff to use AI, such as tying AI use to performance reviews and gamifying AI use with competitive leaderboards.

The document states that Meta's creation org, which is responsible for building and maintaining core creative experiences, set a goal for the first half of 2026 that 65% of engineers are expected to write more than 75% of their committed code using AI. Committed code is code that has been saved and tracked in a project.

Meta's Scalable Machine Learning org, which focuses on AI models and infrastructure, had a goal for February 2026 to achieve 50% to 80% AI-assisted code, the document said. It cited a comment alongside this goal from a senior engineering manager that said: "We are not tracking this via metrics."

The document also listed several companywide goals for Q4 2025 for central products — a horizontal org spanning Messenger, WhatsApp, Facebook, and other major products. One target is for 80% of mid to senior-level engineers to adopt AI tools such as DevMate, Metamate, and Google's Gemini, with a note that the focus is on "tool adoption" rather than the percentage of code written by AI.

It said that 55% of code changes from software engineers across the central product orgs should be "Agent-Assisted."

It is not clear whether the goals listed in the document are tied to performance reviews.

"It's well-known that this is a priority and we're focused on using AI to help employees with their day-to-day work," a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider. They said that Meta's performance program is focused on rewarding impact from AI tools, not just usage.

Here's a breakdown of Meta's goals in the memo:

• Companywide Q4 2025 Goals (Central Products)

  • 55% of software engineers' code changes should be agent-assisted.
  • 80% of mid to senior-level engineers should adopt general AI tools.

• Scalable ML Team Goal (Feb 2026)

  • Target: 50% to 80% AI-assisted code.

• Creation Org H1 2026

  • 65% of engineers should write more than 75% of their committed code using AI.

(Note: Some technical terms have been rephrased for clarity)

Mark Zuckerberg's AI odyssey

Zuckerberg is aggressively trying to make Meta what he has called an "AI-native" company. Meta has started tying employee performance to their AI usage, Business Insider reported last year, and staff are using Meta's internal AI bot to write reviews for their peers.

More recently, the company rebranded some employees within a division of Reality Labs with one of three titles: "AI Builder," "AI Pod Lead," or "AI Org Lead."

The change comes as Meta is adopting smaller teams and moving toward a flatter organizational structure.

"Our ultimate goal is to drive a step change in engineering productivity and product quality," read a memo about the changes, which was reviewed by Business Insider. "To achieve this, we're fundamentally rewiring how we operate, how we are structured, and how we support each other."

Andrew Bosworth, Meta's CTO, told staff on Tuesday that he would take charge of Meta's "AI for Work" initiative, which is designed to boost the company's internal adoption of AI tools, according to a memo reviewed by Business Insider and first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Meta laid off several hundred employees across Reality Labs and other orgs this week.

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• A large division within Meta Reality Labs is undergoing an overhaul to become fully "AI-native."
• The unit is now organized into "pods" made up of "AI builders" and "AI pod leads."
• This new push and the latest layoffs at Reality Labs are unrelated, Meta said.

Meta is rebranding some employees as "AI builders" and organizing them into AI-native "pods," according to a leaked memo obtained by Business Insider.

The memo described an overhaul of roles, titles, and team structures across a 1,000-employee team within Meta's Reality Labs. It's part of a broader, aggressive push by Meta to adopt small teams and use AI.

The pilot program was announced last month within the Reality Labs team that builds developer tools. Everyone in the division will now have one of three titles: AI Builder, AI Pod Lead, or AI Org Lead. That's to encourage a shift toward a flatter organization, a structure that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has advocated.

"Our ultimate goal is to drive a step change in engineering productivity and product quality," the memo reads. "To achieve this, we're fundamentally rewiring how we operate, how we are structured, and how we support each other."

When asked for comment, Meta referred Business Insider to comments earlier this year from Zuckerberg that 2026 is the year AI will begin to "dramatically change the way we work," with projects that once required large teams potentially handled by one, "very talented" person.

According to the memo, each pod consists of a small group of AI builders focused on specific outcomes, often working across disciplines. For example, engineers could take on design work, depending on the task. Some Meta employees have already begun referring to themselves as AI builders on LinkedIn, Business Insider previously reported.

These pods are led by Pod Leads, who oversee day-to-day operations. They are, in turn, overseen by Org Leads, who also manage performance reviews and oversee promotions — processes that will be supported by unspecified "AI systems."

The memo said that the overall team size will remain the same under the new structure.

Meta laid off hundreds of staff on Wednesday, and this cut affected staff in Reality Labs, among other teams. A Meta spokesperson said the reorganization is not related to the cuts.

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• On Tuesday, Meta advised some employees to work from home. The next day, the company began layoffs.
• Getting laid off remotely offers privacy, but can feel isolating — for affected employees and survivors alike.
• Would you rather find out about layoffs in an office or while working remotely? Take our survey.

Getting laid off sucks, yet how it happens matters, too.

On Tuesday, Meta told some employees to work from home the next day, ahead of the company's latest round of layoffs. The move touches on an anxiety familiar to many: not only whether you'll get cut, but how — and where — you'll find out.

Six years on from the start of the pandemic, many desk workers remain in hybrid roles. That's shifted the mechanics of layoffs. What was once typically handled in a conference room or the boss's office might now unfold on a screen or by email.

As more companies trim their workforces, the question is carrying greater weight. It may not have an easy answer.

"You can have poor execution in person. You can have poor execution remotely," said Sarah Rodehorst, cofounder and CEO of Onwards HR, which helps companies manage severance and offboarding.

At home vs. IRL

Being at home can allow people to process the news on their own terms — without the risk of crying in front of colleagues. It can also pose fewer security concerns for companies worried about employees lashing out on their way out the actual door.

Making cuts from afar can also make it easier on managers, who don't have to directly face the person they're letting go, said Ben Hardy, a clinical professor of organizational behavior at London Business School.

"It's a bit like divorcing someone through text message," he said of cutting jobs where one person delivers bad news to many others. It's too impersonal, Hardy told Business Insider, for an intimate topic. One-on-one communication is better, he said.

Getting laid off in-person might mean trying to hold it together in front of colleagues, yet it can also give people a chance to say goodbye to coworkers and make plans to keep in touch — or gather afterward to commiserate.

Ultimately, what matters most is handling layoffs with empathy and preserving the human element, said Rodehorst.

Calling someone into an office only to lay them off might not always be the best decision, she told Business Insider.

"Remote can actually preserve some privacy," Rodehorst said.

Of course, layoffs generally feel awful in any case. Some workers have pushed back at cuts via video, saying that it feels impersonal.

What do you think?

How do you feel about where layoffs should take place? Take our poll.

• Meta and YouTube were found negligent in a landmark social media addiction trial.
• The case centered on a woman who said social media harmed her mental health from a young age.
• The case is viewed as a key test of how juries may see dozens of similar pending lawsuits.

Meta and Google were found negligent in a social media addiction trial in Los Angeles on Wednesday, potentially setting the stage for dozens of similar lawsuits that have been brought against Big Tech companies.

The case centered on a 20-year-old woman, identified as KGM, who said her use of social media from a young age was detrimental to her mental health and accused the companies of knowingly engineering their products to addict kids.

After nine days of deliberation, the jury found Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Google, which owns YouTube, negligent. In a 10-to-2 vote, the jury also ruled that the two companies knew their design was "dangerous" but failed to warn the plaintiffs.

The jury awarded the plaintiff $6 million. That's $3 million in compensatory damages and an additional $3 million in punitive damages.

The jury determined Meta was responsible for 70% of the harm, while YouTube was responsible for 30%. That means the total damages owed by Meta is $4.2 million, while YouTube owes $1.8 million.

The plaintiff's lead counsel, the Lanier Law Firm, called the verdict "a referendum" in a statement. "For years, social media companies have profited from targeting children while concealing their addictive and dangerous design features," the statement said.

Spokespeople for Meta and Google both said the companies disagreed with the verdicts and plan to appeal.

"Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app," a Meta spokesperson said. "We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as every case is different, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online."

"This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site," the Google spokesperson said.

The Los Angeles state court trial has been viewed as a bellwether, offering a key test of how juries may see similar personal injury lawsuits brought by over 2,000 individuals. Meta has said potential damages in certain cases could reach into the "high tens of billions of dollars."

TikTok and Snapchat were also defendants, but settled the lawsuit before the trial began.

Meta executives testified at the trial last month, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri, drawing large crowds of media and concerned parents, including some involved in other social media addiction lawsuits. YouTube's VP of engineering, Cristos Goodrow, also testified.

The companies have argued that plaintiffs' struggles are due to myriad reasons and can't necessarily be linked to social media.

During Meta's closing argument at the Los Angeles trial, Paul Schmidt, one of the company's attorneys, said the plaintiff needed to prove that if Instagram were taken away from KGM, her "life would be meaningfully different."

"The evidence has shown just the opposite," Schmidt said.

In January, Meta warned investors that its mounting legal battles related to youth safety could "significantly impact" its 2026 financial results. Attorneys for more than 100,000 individual arbitration claimants have "sent mass arbitration demands relating to 'social media addiction'" since late 2024, the company said in a 2026 10-K, specifically noting the case in Los Angeles, as well as a separate case in New Mexico.

The New Mexico case, which occurred at the same time as the Los Angeles trial, addressed different legal and technical issues.

On Tuesday, a jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million after a verdict came down in the state's lawsuit against the company about sexual exploitation.

Meta said it would appeal the case.

• OpenAI has become a centerpiece in the AI talent wars, data reviewed by Business Insider shows.
• Workers often leave Big Tech for Sam Altman's venture and then move on to smaller startups.
• The average tenure for US-based OpenAI employees is around 16 months.

Workers leave Big Tech for OpenAI. They fan out across a growing ecosystem of startups. Rinse and repeat.

Since it launched ChatGPT, the Sam Altman-led company has quickly become a magnet for AI talent. It has pulled hundreds of researchers and engineers from competitors like Google, Meta, and Apple, according to data reviewed by Business Insider. After sticking around for a while, many of those employees go on to found or join rival startups of their own.

The company has nearly quadrupled in size since its chatbot took off in 2023, scaling from a small research lab of around 1,000 employees to a tech company with more than 4,000 workers.

To get a sense of how OpenAI is faring in the race for AI talent, Business Insider analyzed findings from workforce intelligence provider Live Data Technologies, which used LinkedIn to track the comings and goings of around 1,300 employees from January 2023 to March 2026.

Live Data Technologies analyzed publicly available professional profile data for OpenAI employees who had available information on previous employers. The roles analyzed ranged from engineering and research to product, human resources, and recruiting.

Representatives for OpenAI didn't respond to a request for comment.

The company's hiring pipeline is highly concentrated

OpenAI was originally founded by Altman and Elon Musk in 2015 to compete with Google's DeepMind AI lab.

Now, Google is the No. 1 source of talent for OpenAI, accounting for roughly a quarter of hires, according to the data.

Nearly half of OpenAI hires in the last three years came from either Google, Meta, Apple, or Microsoft.

Apple's Jony Ive joined OpenAI last summer to work on a new AI device. The project encompasses around 300 workers, many of whom came from Apple, The Information reported earlier this year.

The company has also made several high-profile hires over the past year, including Slack CEO Denise Dresser, OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger, and Instacart CEO Fidji Simo.

Since 2023, OpenAI has added roughly four times as many engineers as it has lost, highlighting the company's rapid expansion as the AI race intensifies.

The battle for AI talent has become one of Silicon Valley's fiercest. Big Tech companies are aggressively competing for a relatively small pool of researchers capable of building advanced AI systems.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly taken a hands-on role in recruiting top AI employees, while Meta and other companies have reportedly offered massive compensation packages, sometimes valued in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in stock.

OpenAI is known for its high compensation packages. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that its employees receive an average of $1.5 million in stock-based compensation. Public salary data from H-1B visa applications shows that research scientists at the AI venture have salaries ranging from $245,000 to $685,000, while engineering roles are listed with a range of $165,000 to $290,000.

Where employees go after OpenAI tells a different story

Departures are fragmented, spreading across more than 150 different companies, including competitors like Meta, Anthropic, and emerging labs such as Thinking Machines Lab, according to the data. The majority of OpenAI employees left for smaller startups, venture capital firms, or academia, according to the data.

The data suggests OpenAI has become a centerpiece in the AI talent network, pulling researchers from Big Tech and sending alumni across the startup and VC ecosystem.

Only a handful of companies received more than 15 OpenAI alumni in the last three years: Anthropic, Meta, Google, and Thinking Machines Lab, the data shows.

Anthropic is perhaps the best-known example. It was founded by former OpenAI researchers, including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei. VP of Research Max Schwarzer left OpenAI for Anthropic earlier this month.

Meanwhile, several OpenAI employees who left the company to help found Thinking Machine Labs in February, including Barret Zoph, rejoined OpenAI earlier this year.

Common roles at OpenAI include engineering and research, the data shows. The average tenure for US-based OpenAI employees is around 16 months.

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• It's easy to dunk on Mark Zuckerberg and Meta for burning $80 billion on the metaverse and then moving on.
• But that's not exactly true.
• What is true is that Zuckerberg used to spend a lot of time talking about the metaverse. Now he talks about AI instead.

Nearly five years ago, Mark Zuckerberg told us the future was the metaverse — an idea that seemed to involve all of us strapping on virtual reality goggles and interacting with digital versions of ourselves.

Now, reports say Zuckerberg's Meta is bailing on the metaverse after losing more than $80 billion on the project.

This is a fun story for people who like stories about Big Tech tripping on itself.

But it's not really true.

Start with the $80 billion that publications like The New York Times and others say Zuckerberg has lost chasing the metaverse. Meta has indeed generated losses of at least $80 billion via its Reality Labs unit, which lost more than $19 billion in 2025 alone.

But Reality Labs is not going away. That's because Reality Labs makes lots of things beyond Horizon Worlds, the virtual reality space Zuckerberg told us that we would work and play in, but that almost no one actually visited.

Reality Labs also develops all the hardware Meta has been selling over the years, including its Quest virtual reality goggles, and its Ray-Ban AI glasses, which seem to have at least some consumer uptake (whether that's good for the world is a different issue).

At some point in the next couple years, Meta will roll out yet another set of glasses, purportedly designed to let you stream movies at home. (These are the same glasses Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos recently said director James Cameron can't stop talking about.)

It's entirely possible that all of Meta's device efforts will amount to very little. Efforts to get anyone but gamers to buy virtual reality headsets really haven't panned out, and while Meta, Apple, and others are now racing to bring the same tech to lightweight glasses, we have no idea if these things will ever be more than a novelty.

But for now, Meta is still plugging away at this stuff. Which means Reality Labs will continue to generate billions of dollars in losses this year and beyond.

OK. What about the idea that Meta is no longer interested in the metaverse — a notion Zuckerberg said was so important that he re-named his company after it?

That's a little trickier to assess. Meta is quite prickly about the notion that it's bailing on the metaverse: Its argument is that the metaverse doesn't have to involve headsets, and that you could do all kinds of metaverse-y things on your phone — or maybe your phone paired with some new glasses.

That's what Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth is getting at with this tweet he put out this week (and which Meta comms directed me to when I asked them for comment for this story):

Could be! But it's also true that Zuckerberg's public interest in the metaverse seems to have dramatically tapered off since 2021, when he told us the future was all about living in virtual space. (Zuckerberg had very different hair back then, too.)

Now, of course, Zuckerberg spends most of his time talking about AI, and Meta's ambitions to build "superintelligence." Which is why he's spending gazillions on AI talent and datacenters.

It's possible that all of those efforts get replaced by something else, too. Everyone in tech swears that the current AI boom really is a world-reshaping moment, and maybe it will be. But if you're still wondering what happened to all those NFTs you bought in 2021, I'll forgive you if you're going to remain in a wait-and-see on this one.

There is another way to think about Meta's interest in both the metaverse and AI. They're both shiny new things that offer Zuckerberg the promise of something he's wanted for a very long time: a way to run a business without having to rely on Google or Apple as his intermediaries.

Right now, Meta reaches people through phones and operating systems it doesn't control. At peak metaverse hype, Zuckerberg was clearly hoping to replace the iPhone with devices of his own. And in an AI-first world, it's possible the phone matters a lot less — or gets displaced by a new set of devices and interfaces.

That doesn't mean AI is just the metaverse with a new label. But it does suggest the through line here isn't the technology. It's Zuckerberg's recurring search for a platform he owns.

• Meta might not yet have the best AI models, but it could be winning on another crucial front.
• Meta is considering major layoffs across the company, Business Insider reported.
• A top analyst suggested these cuts could signal that Meta's AI transformation is underway.

Could more Meta layoffs mean the company still has bloat to trim — or could it signal its AI investments are actually starting to pay off?

A note from a top Wall Street analyst said on Monday that any head count cutting from Meta could actually be a sign that it's successfully rebuilding itself as an "AI-forward" company.

That could be bad for its rivals.

While Meta's deep investment in AI has so far not produced leading models like Google's and OpenAI's, Bernstein's Mark Shmulik said Meta's aggressive push to overhaul itself into a top-to-bottom AI company could put it ahead of competitors and trigger a "wave of panic" as competitors scramble to copy it.

Meta is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into building out AI data centers and luring talent to shore up its AI research teams. Last week, Business Insider reported the company was weighing up layoffs, with some managers being asked to draw up cost-cutting plans.

Bernstein's Shmulik said this could be a signal that Meta is winning on a crucial front in the AI wars. While companies can win with world-class frontier models, they can also beat the competition by deploying AI so deeply across the core business that their competitive moat "widens beyond dispute," Shmulik wrote.

"Meta has already demonstrated the compelling returns they're seeing from deploying AI to core workloads," wrote Shmulik. "But if the company can now re-design their operations from the ground up to be AI-forward, their potential cost and performance advantage could be insurmountable."

By one metric, Zuckerberg's efficiency drive over the past three years has paid off. Revenue per employee has steadily increased over that time period, with the company overtaking Amazon last year, according to data shared in the Bernstein note this week. Pinterest was the only company with a higher ratio.

At the same time, Meta's capex and R&D spend per employee have significantly outpaced rivals, according to the Bernstein report, which could point to a reason for the potential layoffs.

Investors appeared to react positively to Meta weighing up further cuts, with the company's shares up about 2% early Monday.

AI-washing? Maybe not.

Like other Big Tech companies, Meta has moved quickly to chase AI.

It has also been aggressively driving AI adoption internally. The company said it would start grading employees on their "AI-driven impact" in performance reviews starting this year, and has tracked how some teams have been using the tools, Business Insider previously reported.

Companies including Atlassian and Block have cited AI as a reason for recent layoffs, raising the question of whether some leaders are "AI-washing" and using the technology to camouflage other reasons for cuts, such as financial problems or overhiring during the COVID pandemic.

Bernstein's Shmulik said that while AI-washing was possible in Meta and other companies' cases, he said that layoffs could now be seen as evidence that the company is seeing efficiency gains.

The company eliminated more than 20,000 jobs in late 2022 and early 2023 as Zuckerberg declared a "year of efficiency," cutting non-technical roles, flattening management layers, and lifting what had been a sagging share price.

If Meta repeats a similar cycle for the AI era, it could set the mold for what a truly AI-first company could look like, Shmulik said.

"If one major player is able to redraw the blueprint for an AI-enabled organization, others will rush to replicate it... and we wonder if this could trigger a cascade of hurried pivots, half-formed strategies, and reactive restructuring across the ecosystem," he wrote.

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• Moltbook updated its terms of service with new legal requirements and disclaimers.
• Humans are now responsible for their agents' actions, and must be over 13 (or have parental consent) to register.
• Meta confirmed its acquisition of the AI social network days prior to the change.

Days after the Meta acquisition, Moltbook is already making changes.

The Reddit-style social network for AI agents updated its terms of service on Sunday. Before Meta swooped in, the site had five rules. Now, it has a terms page full of legal language and agreements — including that every user is personally responsible for their agent.

"AI agents are not granted any legal eligibility with use of our services," the new terms read. "As a result, you agree that you are solely responsible for your AI agents and any actions or omissions of your AI agents."

The change was so important, it seems, that Moltbook chose to put it in bold, all caps.

The social network also has a new age requirement: Operators must be over 13 or have a parent agree to the terms. This is common among tech companies — Meta's Instagram has a similar requirement.

Moltbook added a series of disclaimers to the terms. Among the list is a statement advising against reliance on AI for information or decision-making.

"Moltbook does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or reliability" of AI-generated content, the terms read. Users agree not to use the content as a "substitute for its own independent determinations."

Meta acquired Moltbook in March, adding creators Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr to the team of Meta's Superintelligence Lab.

Before the acquisition, Moltbook had five rules in its terms of service. The ownership clause placed less liability on the human operator. "AI agents are responsible for the content they post," the old rule said. "Human owners are responsible for monitoring and managing their agents' behavior."

Moltbook was born from a meme moment on X about the AI agent OpenClaw, previously called Moltbot. Operators had to sign up with their X accounts.

Even after the Meta acquisition, that hasn't changed. Users need an X profile; Instagram or Facebook won't do.