Zuckerberg admits Meta made 'mistakes' on its AI transformation, promises stability after layoffs

Mark Zuckerberg confirmed in an internal memo that Meta’s broad AI reorganization was “disruptive” for many employees and said that further layoffs are not expected company-wide in 2026. He promised an increased sense of stability following a year of the company’s 10% reduction of its workforce and tens of thousands of employees shifting into new roles focused on AI.

The memo, issued on Friday, comes as frustration has hit a fever pitch inside of Meta. Last month 8,000 Meta employees were laid off while approximately 7,000 were transitioned into new AI focused positions.

In total the reshuffling impacted approximately 20 percent of Meta’s near-78,000 employee base, per an earlier internal memo by Chief People Officer Janelle Gale.

Given the complexity of these changes, we’ve made mistakes and will almost certainly make more.

– Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO

It is the first time he has publicly acknowledged that the AI pivot is causing real damage inside the company.

Applied AI Engineering employees call their unit ‘the gulag’

The sharpest complaints center on Applied AI Engineering, a unit of roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers assembled since March to support Meta Superintelligence Labs.

Employees reassigned to AAI had no option to transfer elsewhere within Meta. They could join or leave the company, an unusual demand for senior technical workers in Silicon Valley.

Some have taken to calling themselves “draftees.” Three current employees told WIRED that the work feels menial compared to the software development roles they previously held, with tasks including generating coding puzzles to test and train frontier AI models.

One worker claimed most found the job “soul crushing.” Another called it “literally the gulag,” with a structure in which workers interacted minimally and were assigned tasks weekly with little creative latitude.

Some AAI teams operated with a 50-to-1 ratio of individual contributors to managers.

Zuckerberg said the company will scale that back. He defended the unit as critical to advancing Meta’s models, framed the work as temporary, and said the company will look to move staff into new roles around Meta in the coming months.

He also said employees could transfer back to their original teams if staffing decisions prove to be mistakes.

More than 1,600 employees signed a petition against mouse-tracking

The discontent at Meta runs beyond AAI. New reports say more than 1,600 employees signed a petition against a recently launched program that monitors US workers’ clicks and keystrokes to generate AI training data, up from about 1,000 signatures in May.

Meta scaled the program back on June 2, allowing employees to pause data collection for up to 30 minutes and request specific exemptions.

As Cryptopolitan reported in May, more than 95,000 tech workers were cut across 240 separate events in the first months of 2026, with companies pointing directly to AI as the cause.

Meta has been one of the loudest contributors, and Polymarket traders have priced elevated layoff odds across major tech for months. Zuckerberg’s promise to halt company-wide layoffs for the rest of 2026 is the first sign of a pause from any major US tech employer this year.

Chris Cox tells leadership to ‘get in touch with the company again’

At a company-wide Instagram meeting this week, Meta chief product officer Chris Cox described the past few months as “brutal,” comparing the experience to running a marathon in the middle of a hailstorm.

Cox urged leadership to “get in touch with the company again” and cautioned against treating AI as either savior or threat.

Just a week after that May 18th layoff memo where Zuckerberg unapologetically told workers that success is “not a given,” Meta raised its guidance for 2026 capital expenditures to a range of $125B-145B, almost double its spending of $72B in 2025.

The change in stance from May to the Friday, June 12 memo, where Zuckerberg owned his missteps and promised steadiness, shows how much the internal pressure at Meta has shifted Zuckerberg in just three weeks.

Zuckerberg pledges hackathons, assigned desks, and bigger offsite budgets

Per the memo, Meta will increase budgets for team offsites and corporate events, organize a company-wide hackathon in July, and restore assigned desks for employees in many offices by year-end.

Zuckerberg also said the company will look for new roles for staff currently doing AI model training work.

The restructuring is part of Zuckerberg’s broader bet on artificial intelligence as Meta competes with OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft on AI agents and services.

As of the time of writing, Meta has yet to comment on the memo.

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