Meta's three-month-old Applied AI unit verges on revolt — 6,500 engineers call it a "gulag"

What happened

TechCrunch revealed on June 12 that Meta's three-month-old Applied AI unit (~6,500 engineers and PMs under CTO Andrew Bosworth, run by Maher Saba) is in open revolt. Insiders dub the assigned work — generating puzzles and coding problems to train AI agents on computer tasks — "the gulag." A livestreamed employee-only presentation was hijacked by a meltdown ordering attendees to tell a senior Meta AI executive an expletive.

Context and impact

Hours later, Zuckerberg sent an internal memo acknowledging "mistakes" in the AI restructuring and pledging no further company-wide layoffs in 2026. The backdrop is Meta's $14.3B June 2025 acquisition of 49% of Scale AI, which brought Alexandr Wang in to run Meta Superintelligence Labs.

Details

• Unit size: ~6,500 engineers and PMs
• Leadership: CTO Andrew Bosworth + Maher Saba
• Triggers: forced reassignments, monotonous data-labeling work
• Escalation: hijacked livestream + 1,600-signature petition against keystroke monitoring
• Zuck memo: acknowledged mistakes; ruled out further company-wide 2026 layoffs