Meta’s months-old AI unit is a soul-crushing gulag, say the engineers stuck inside it
TechCrunch / 6/13/2026
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Key Points
- A Wired report claims Meta’s newly formed Applied AI team, made up of roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers, is experiencing growing internal unrest amid harsh working conditions.
- The article describes an incident where a hijacked, employee-only livestream was interrupted by a profanity-laced outburst targeting a senior Meta AI executive.
- Employees reportedly feel they were “drafted” into the unit with little choice, and say their tasks—such as generating puzzles and coding problems for AI training—are “soul-crushing.”
- A separate petition signed by 1,600+ Meta employees protests a monitoring program that tracks clicks and keystrokes for AI training data, with Meta product chief Chris Cox reportedly calling the environment “brutal.”
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