The tech giant made thousands of engineers train their AI replacements--then fired them. When Meta engineer David Frenk posted an anti-AI farewell parody video in an internal message board, staff thought it perfectly captured shifts in company culture. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. This week, Meta laid off 8,000 employees--10 percent of the company's staff--and reassigned another 7,000 to train AI models. Fear of the layoffs had been building around the company for weeks, compounded by the way that Meta has taken a sharp turn from a company built by coders to a company that has staked its future on AI.

On the eve of about 8,000 jobs being cut, employees are cashing in on headphone stipends and other perks while they still can. Ahead of Meta's latest round of mass layoffs tomorrow, some employees are deserting offices, abandoning their work, and loading up on perks they might soon lose, several people at the company tell WIRED. Two employees describe a widespread rush to use up an annual $2,000 flexible benefit, which can cover a variety of expenses including health and wellness activities. A separate triennial credit of $200 toward the purchase of audio gear has led to a scramble to purchase Apple AirPods and other headphones. Another source says Meta offices have been largely empty this week, as people prioritize polishing their résumés and gather offsite to commiserate with friends for what may be their final time as colleagues.

Next week, Meta is cutting about 10 percent of its staff. WIRED spoke with more than a dozen current and former employees about what it's like inside a company where everyone is unhappy. As Meta employees brace for layoffs next Wednesday, May 20, many say the vibes are horrifically, historically low. "Everyone is unhappy; the only people who are not unhappy are, literally, executives," says an employee who works on Instagram. The social media giant plans to cut about 10 percent of its workforce, or nearly 8,000 people, "to run the company more efficiently" and "offset the other investments" it's making, according to a human resources leader .

Grand Theft Auto made him a legend. In July this year workers at Build a Rocket Boy, a video game studio in Edinburgh, were called to an all-staff meeting. Their first ever game, a sci-fi adventure called MindsEye, had been released three weeks earlier - and it had been a total disaster. Critics and players called it broken, buggy, and the worst game of 2025. Addressing staff via video link, the company's boss, Leslie Benzies, assured them there was a plan to get things back on track and said the negativity they'd seen was uncalled for.

Booth is a reporter at TIME. Governor Gavin Newsom speaks at Google about preparing students and workers for the next generation of technology, in San Francisco, California, on August 7, 2025. Governor Gavin Newsom speaks at Google about preparing students and workers for the next generation of technology, in San Francisco, California, on August 7, 2025. Booth is a reporter at TIME. CEOs of the companies racing to build smarter AI--Google DeepMind, OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic--have been clear about the stakes.

Defense tech giant Palantir is selling T-shirts and tote bags as part of a bid to encourage fans to publicly endorse it. Palantir Technologies, which moved from Silicon Valley to Denver in 2020, sells software that immigration authorities use to identify and arrest people, militaries use to organize drone strikes, and corporations use to manage their supply chains. Now, it also sells tote bags. Last year, Palantir re launched an online merchandise store, and its website was recently redesigned with a swanky interface and new payment system . A mock terminal in the lower left corner displays "code" documenting each item you view.

When investors poured 6.6 billion into OpenAI last week, they seemed largely unbothered by the latest drama, which recently saw the company's chief technology officer, Mira Murati, along with chief research officer Bob McCrew and Barret Zoph, a vice president of research, abruptly quit. And yet those three departures were just the latest in an ongoing exodus of key technical talent. Over the past few years, OpenAI has lost several researchers who played crucial roles in developing the algorithms, techniques, and infrastructure that helped make it the world leader in AI as well as a household name. Several other ex-OpenAI employees who spoke to WIRED said that an ongoing shift to a more commercial focus continues to be a source of friction. "People who like to do research are being forced to do product," says one former employee who works at a rival AI company but has friends at OpenAI. This person says some of their contacts at the firm have reached out in recent weeks to inquire about jobs.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas speaks at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Artificial intelligence, we have been told, is all but guaranteed to change everything. Often, it is foretold as bringing a series of woes: "extinction," "doom,"; AI is at risk of "killing us all." US lawmakers have warned of potential "biological, chemical, cyber, or nuclear" perils associated with advanced AI models and a study commissioned by the State Department on "catastrophic risks," urged the federal government to intervene and enact safeguards against the weaponization and uncontrolled use of this rapidly evolving technology. Employees at some of the main AI labs have made their safety concerns public and experts in the field, including the so-called "godfathers of AI," have argued that "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI" should be a global priority. Advancements in AI capabilities have heightened fears of the possible elimination of certain jobs and the misuse of the technology to spread disinformation and interfere in elections.

Recent weeks have not been kind to OpenAI. The release of the company's latest model, GPT-4o, has been somewhat overshadowed by a series of accusations leveled at both the company and its CEO, Sam Altman. This comes at the same time that several high-profile employees, including co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, have chosen to leave the company. This is not the first time the Silicon Valley startup has been embroiled in scandal. In November, Altman was briefly ousted from the company after the board found he had not been "consistently candid" with them.

Investors led by Microsoft pressured OpenAI to reinstate Altman, which it did within days, alongside vague promises to be more responsible. Then, last month, the company disbanded the internal group tasked with safety research, known as the "superalignment team." Some of the team's most prominent members publicly resigned, including its head, Jan Leike, who posted on X that "over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products." Fortune reported that OpenAI did not provide anywhere near the resources it had initially, publicly promised for safety research. Saunders, who also worked on superalignment, said he resigned when he "lost hope a few months before Jan did."