Meta's new AI unit is causing an employee morale crisis, with workers assigned against their will to tasks they see as menial, raising questions about whether the company's aggressive AI spending is sustainable.

What happened: Meta transferred about 7,000 employees to AI-focused teams during last month's layoffs (which affected about 8,000 people overall). One team, Meta's applied AI engineering unit, has become a flashpoint: workers report being assigned repetitive, low-challenge tasks to help improve AI models, and at least one employee interrupted a company meeting to publicly complain about the arrangement.

Why it matters: Many of these employees joined Meta believing in its core social media mission, and they say they were doing valuable work on projects that helped make the company profitable. Now they feel their labor is being redirected solely to train AI, while Meta simultaneously announced it will monitor their laptop usage to capture data for AI training as well. The frustration is particularly acute because Meta is reporting record-breaking or near record-breaking financial quarters, yet employees do not see their AI projects as the driver of that success.

What to watch: Meta's leadership, including Mark Zuckerberg, has begun publicly addressing the morale crisis in open forums, signaling the company recognizes the problem has reached a critical level. How the company responds to employee dissatisfaction—and whether it can retain talent while continuing its AI-first restructuring—will shape the sustainability of its AI ambitions.