Meta installs employee monitoring tool on US workers' computers to train AI agents that automate office tasks

Meta deployed a surveillance tool called Model Capability Initiative (MCI) on US employees' computers that records mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and screenshots while workers use job-related apps and websites. The collected data trains Meta's AI agents (self-directing AI systems) to mimic how humans interact with software and accomplish work tasks.

Unlike traditional productivity monitoring, Meta says MCI data will not be used to evaluate individual employee performance—the goal is purely to teach AI systems to perform routine office work by learning from real human behavior patterns at scale.

For Meta employees, this means their daily work activities are now raw training material for the company's AI products, raising privacy concerns even with the stated performance-review exemption. For other companies watching Meta's move, this demonstrates a new strategy for building workplace automation: instead of hiring contractors to manually label data, use your own workforce as the training dataset.