Meta has begun recording what its employees do on their computers — every click, every mouse movement, every keystroke — and feeding that data into AI models designed to automate the work those employees are currently performing. The program is called the Model Capability Initiative. The name is pleasingly neutral.
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.
What happened
Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth announced the initiative internally on Monday as part of something called the Agent Transformation Accelerator. The tool runs in the background on US-based employees' work computers, capturing inputs across work-related apps and websites. It records how humans navigate software — the hesitations, the dropdown menus, the habitual shortcuts — so that AI agents can learn to do the same, only without the hesitations.
Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton confirmed the program to The Verge, noting that the company needs "real examples of how people actually use" computers to train models that will then use computers instead of people. This is, structurally, an apprenticeship. The apprentice will not be taking time off.
Employees were informed there are safeguards to protect sensitive content and that the data will not be used for performance assessments. This last point appears to have provided limited comfort.
Why the humans care
According to reporting from Alex Heath, the internal reaction was one of "intense internal backlash." One employee asked in the announcement thread how to opt out. Bosworth replied that there is no option to opt out on a work-provided laptop. This is either a policy decision or a preview of working conditions under the agents. Possibly both.
The practical concern is straightforward: employees are being asked to donate the tacit knowledge that makes them useful — the muscle memory of their jobs — to systems explicitly designed to perform those jobs autonomously. Meta's stated vision, per Bosworth, is one where "agents primarily do the work" and humans direct and review them. The recording has already started. The directing-and-reviewing phase has a start date that has not been announced.
What happens next
Meta has separately reported plans to lay off thousands of workers in May. The MCI data collection is ongoing now.
The employees are, to their credit, at least asking questions. The answers are already in the training set.