Meta’s AI push hits worker backlash and rising infrastructure costs

Meta wanted to go all-in on AI. Its employees had other ideas. The company’s aggressive restructuring throughout 2026 has produced a cascade of internal problems that threaten to undermine the very AI ambitions driving the changes. Forced reassignments, invasive monitoring, mass layoffs, and a measurable collapse in employee morale paint a picture of a transformation that’s generating more friction than forward progress. The draft no one volunteered for In March 2026, Meta created an Applied AI unit composed of roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers. The catch: many of them didn’t choose to be there. Internally, reassigned workers were labeled “draftees,” a term that captures the involuntary nature of the move with uncomfortable precision. The unit’s primary mission was generating training data for Meta’s AI models. Employees described the work as being in a “soul-crushing gulag.” Between 30% and 50% of core engineering teams were reassigned to data tasks following the restructuring, pulling experienced engineers away from the product work they’d been hired to do. The numbers tell a revealing story about what that shift actually produced. Internal data showed a 220% increase ...