More than 700 workers at Meta contractor Covalen in Dublin face potential job loss as the company cuts staff to fund increased AI spending

Covalen employees—roughly 500 of them data annotators who check AI-generated material against Meta's safety rules—were notified of layoffs in a brief video meeting on Monday afternoon and were not allowed to ask questions. More than 700 employees stand to potentially lose their jobs in total, marking the second round of cuts in recent months; between the two layoff rounds, Covalen's Dublin headcount is on track to be almost halved.

The affected workers label and refine outputs from Meta's AI models, tasking themselves with evaluating dangerous and illegal content and sometimes creating elaborate prompts to test whether guardrails prevent models from generating child sexual abuse material or descriptions of suicide. One employee stated the work amounts to "training the AI to take over our jobs."

Laid-off workers face a six-month "cooldown period" during which they cannot apply to competing Meta vendors, according to the Communications Workers' Union. Unions are pushing for negotiations on severance and plan to meet with the Irish government to discuss AI's impact on workers in the country.