The message aimed to rally support for a petition circulating inside the company since last Thursday that demands an end to what Meta calls the Model Capability Initiative. It’s a piece of mandatory software that Meta began installing on the laptops of US employees last month. The tool records employees’ screens when using certain apps with the goal of collecting “real examples of how people actually use” computers, including “mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus,” according to Reuters. Meta has yet to say whether the initial data is paying off. “I'm mixed on Al. On one hand, I really enjoy using it to write software. On the other hand, I'm really nervous about its impact on the world,” the engineer wrote in an internal forum for coders. “And what kind of norms are we establishing about how the technology is used, and how people are going to be treated?” The petition, also seen by WIRED, states that “it should not be the norm that companies of any size are permitted to exploit their employees by nonconsensually extracting their data for the purposes of Al training.” In the US, employers generally have wide latitude to monitor workers’ devices for security, training, evaluation, and safety purposes. But using these tools to build datasets that instruct AI systems on navigating computers without human supervision appears to be a new tactic—and one that doesn’t sit right with many Meta workers. Over the past few years, several companies have jumped into the race to develop agentic AI models. But when gathering data, they have typically tapped volunteers, sometimes paid, who are willing to have their computer activity recorded. Meta’s decision to move forward with its tracking tool despite weeks of protest from employees has become one of the leading reasons for what 16 current and former employees recently described to WIRED as record-low morale. It’s also the leading driver of an employee unionization effort at Meta’s UK offices. “The