Meta installs keystroke-tracking software on employee computers to train AI

Meta is quietly turning its workforce into an AI training dataset. The social media giant is rolling out surveillance software called the Model Capability Initiative (MCI) onto U.S. employees’ work computers, recording mouse movements, keystrokes, on-screen activity, and periodic screenshots as workers go about their daily tasks. The program is part of Meta’s broader ambition to build AI agents capable of autonomously completing complex office work.

Why Meta wants your every click

Despite rapid advances in artificial intelligence, Meta’s executives acknowledge that current AI systems still struggle with the mundane mechanics of computer use — navigating dropdown menus, switching between apps, or executing keyboard shortcuts efficiently. To solve this, the company decided it needed something no synthetic dataset could provide: real footage of humans actually working. By logging the daily habits of tens of thousands of employees across approved apps like Gmail, Google Chat, VS Code, and Meta’s own internal AI assistant Metamate, the company hopes to teach its AI agents how to work the way people do.

Employees push back — with no way outThe announcement did not go over quietly inside Meta. On the company’s internal communications platform, the most upvoted response to the rollout post read: “This makes me super uncomfortable. How do we opt out?” Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth answered plainly — there is no opt-out for company-provided laptops. His response drew a wave of shocked, crying, and angry emoji reactions. Meta has insisted the data will be used solely to train AI models and not for employee performance reviews, and that existing safeguards will protect sensitive content. The company also noted that some level of activity monitoring on work machines has existed for years. Still, the forced nature of the program and the granularity of data collected have left many workers unsettled, adding a human cost to Meta’s relentless push to lead the AI race against rivals like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft.