Meta will start tracking the way employees work, including their keystrokes and mouse clicks, to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models.

The organization, which owns Instagram and Facebook, told workers on Tuesday that a recent tool will run on Meta’s computers and internal apps, logging their activity to be used as training data for AI innovation.

A Meta spokesman told the BBC: “If we’re building agents to help the public complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how individuals actually utilize them.”

“The data is not used for any other purpose,” he stated, adding that the tool has “safeguards in place to protect sensitive content”.

But one Meta employee, who asked not to be identified, remarked 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 business has become obsessed with AI,” they told the BBC.

Another person who recently left the enterprise stated 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 corporation 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’s spokesman declined to comment on the company’s removal of job listings or plans for cuts.

Meta’s novel tracking tool is 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 corporation before, however tracking and logging specifically To training and improving AI tools is novel.

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 digital systems.

Meta plans to spend roughly $140bn on AI in 2026, almost double the amount it invested in the digital systems a year ago.

In 2025, it took over nearly half of Scale AI with a $14bn (£10.3bn) investment, and brought some 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 fresh employee tracker, Meta is hoping to train novel AI models that will come out of the lab.

In January, Zuckerberg noted that 2026 will be “the year that AI dramatically changes the way we work”.

“We’re starting to see projects that used to take massive teams now be accomplished by a single, very talented person,” he stated at the time.

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