Mark Zuckerberg told Meta employees that the company’s AI agent efforts weren’t accelerating as quickly as expected and that a sweeping reorganization that included thousands of layoffs had yet to deliver promised benefits, according to a City Hall recording heard by Reuters.
“The trajectory of drug development over at least the past four months has not accelerated as much as we had hoped,” he said, citing a Reuters report on the matter, adding that the company’s bet on the new structure “has not yet come to fruition.” Zuckerberg acknowledged that the restructuring, which saw about 10% of the global workforce laid off in May and about 7,000 staff redeployed to AI-focused teams, was not as “clean” as expected and that management had misjudged the timing.
He recalled that during planning in January and February, senior leaders were “very optimistic” about tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and were “worried that we wouldn’t be able to move fast enough to adapt.” Zuckerberg now expects to see an even bigger return on his company’s AI investments within the next three to six months. Meta is expected to spend up to $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year.
At the same City Hall meeting, Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth said an investigation into the company’s controversial mouse-tracking software, which records employees’ digital activities for AI training, found that no staff data was used to train models, according to Reuters. He said if the program is reinstated after the review, it will be opt-in only, reversing a previous policy that did not give employees a choice. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on City Hall’s remarks.
