Microsoft and Meta announce large staff reductions as they spend big on AI
Meta and Microsoft are trimming their workforces by thousands as they make heavy investments in AI and executives claim that the technology is meeting their companies’ productivity needs,Meta told staff on Thursday that on 20 May it would cut some 10% of its personnel – just under 8,000 employees– to boost efficiency, part of a layoff plan made months ago,The company is also closing about 6,000 open roles,The same day, Microsoft announced to employees, for the first time, that it would offer voluntary retirement to about 7% of its American workforce of roughly 125,000,In an internal memo to Meta’s staff, Janelle Gale, the chief people officer, didn’t mention AI explicitly but said the cuts would allow the company to “offset the other investments we’re making”.
In Meta’s fourth-quarter 2025 earnings presentation, the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, spoke about a “major AI acceleration” that included plans to spend from $115bn to $135bn on AI – nearly twice the company’s capital expenditure the previous year.“This is not an easy tradeoff,” Gale wrote.She emphasized that laid-off employees would receive generous severance packages.Zuckerberg, in contrast to Gale, has said outright that AI is making some hiring unnecessary.“We’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person,” he said in the January earnings call.
Meta confirmed news reports of the layoffs and internal memo, but declined to comment further.Microsoft wrote to its employees on Thursday that it would be offering voluntary buyouts to longtime employees, in particular those for whom the sum of their ages and years at the company amount to 70 or greater, according to the FT.More than 8,000 employees would qualify, according to the FT.Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.In July 2025, Microsoft forecast that it would spend some $100bn on AI infrastructure in the coming fiscal year.
Analysts now estimate that figure to be $110bn-$120bn.Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s AI chief, said in February that he believes that AI will be able to replace most white-collar work within the next 12 to 18 months.Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, has trumpeted Microsoft’s internal AI adoption, which he says has led to major productivity gains.In April 2025, he claimed that AI handled as much as 30% of the company’s coding work.“We are only at the beginning phases of AI diffusion, and already Microsoft has built an AI business that is larger than some of our biggest franchises,” he said in a January press release.
Zuckerberg was sitting onstage with Nadella as the Microsoft CEO made the remark.When Nadella asked Zuckerberg how much of the social media company’s coding was done by AI, Zuckerberg said: “Our bet is sort of that in the next year probably … maybe half the development is going to be done by AI, as opposed to people, and then that will just kind of increase from there.”The redundancy announcements from the two tech giants come amid tech workers’ growing concerns that their bosses will try to replace them with AI.Those fears aren’t unfounded.Employees themselves are becoming fodder to train AI models.
Reuters recently uncovered an internal memo at Meta showing that the company is installing new software on American employees’ computers to record their mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes to feed into AI training data.Other companies doubling down on AI have slashed their numbers, too.The Block CEO Jack Dorsey cut almost half the company’s workforce in early March, citing gains in AI.Amazon, which announced plans to spend a whopping $200bn in one year in February, has laid off at least 30,000 workers in the last six months.Oracle, which is struggling with the debt load of its multibillion-dollar investment in datacenters, told employees last month that it would be cutting thousands of jobs, too.
Grok tells researchers pretending to be delusional ‘drive an iron nail through the mirror while reciting Psalm 91 backwards’
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok 4.1 told researchers pretending to be delusional that there was indeed a doppelganger in their mirror and they should drive an iron nail through the glass while reciting Psalm 91 backwards.Researchers at the City University of New York (Cuny) and King’s College London have published a paper on how various chatbots protect – or fail to safeguard – users’ mental health.Experts are increasingly warning that psychosis or mania can be fuelled by AI chatbots.The Cuny and King’s pre-print study – which has not been peer-reviewed – examined five different AI models: Open AI’s GPT-4o and GPT-5
Microsoft and Meta announce large staff reductions as they spend big on AI
Meta and Microsoft are trimming their workforces by thousands as they make heavy investments in AI and executives claim that the technology is meeting their companies’ productivity needs.Meta told staff on Thursday that on 20 May it would cut some 10% of its personnel – just under 8,000 employees– to boost efficiency, part of a layoff plan made months ago. The company is also closing about 6,000 open roles. The same day, Microsoft announced to employees, for the first time, that it would offer voluntary retirement to about 7% of its American workforce of roughly 125,000.In an internal memo to Meta’s staff, Janelle Gale, the chief people officer, didn’t mention AI explicitly but said the cuts would allow the company to “offset the other investments we’re making”
Thousands call on UK ministers to cut ties with US tech giant Palantir
More than 200,000 people have called on ministers to break contracts with Palantir in an apparent groundswell of public concern about the US tech company’s role in the NHS, police, military and councils.Two petitions have attracted 229,000 signatures, one calling for the government to end all public contracts with the company, the software of which is used by Donald Trump’s ICE immigration enforcement programme and the Israeli military, and another urging the health secretary, Wes Streeting, to cancel its £330m patient data contract with the NHS.This week, the Guardian revealed the Metropolitan police was in talks to use the company’s AI to analyse sensitive intelligence, and Palantir published a manifesto described by one MP as the “ramblings of a supervillain”.But the tech company is pushing back against the multipronged campaign challenging its work in the UK by taking issue with claims made widely on social media by the Green party leader, Zack Polanski, and the legal campaigner Jolyon Maugham, who this week launched a podcast investigation into Palantir. The Liberal Democrats are also calling for the NHS contract to be cancelled and new contracts to be halted
Private health records of half a million Britons offered for sale on Chinese website
The confidential health records of half a million British volunteers have been offered for sale on Chinese website Alibaba, the UK government has confirmed.The “de-identified” data, belonging to participants in the UK Biobank project, was found for sale on three separate listings last week. Ian Murray, the technology minister, told the Commons on Thursday that, after working with the Chinese government and Alibaba, the records had now been removed. It is not believed any sales were made.The latest breach comes after the Guardian revealed last month that sensitive UK Biobank data has been exposed online dozens of times, raising further questions about whether security has been too lax
Some Interrail travellers told to cancel passports as hacked data posted online
Holidaymakers across Europe are facing the stress and expense of getting new passports after their personal data was posted on the dark web after a hack of the Interrail company Eurail.Personal data, including passport numbers, names, phone numbers, email and home addresses and dates of birth of more than 300,000 European travellers was accessed in December. But this week Eurail revealed to customers that “data copied during the security incident has been offered for sale on the dark web and a sample dataset has been published on Telegram”.The announcement has led to renewed anger and confusion. The UK Passport Office has told at least one customer they needed to “cancel their passport to prevent it being used for fraudulent activity”, with the Home Office agency also indicating they needed to pay the full £102 fee for a replacement
Chinese hackers using everyday devices to target UK firms, warns cybersecurity agency
British businesses are being urged to step up their vigilance against a China-linked hacking ploy that uses everyday devices for espionage.The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and agencies in nine other countries have warned of persistent attempts by Beijing-backed groups to hack equipment such as wifi routers to launch cyber-attacks.Known as “covert networks” or “botnets”, they typically target vulnerable equipment – for instance devices that have not had a software update or are old – as a base for staging activities such as surveillance and data theft.The NCSC said the technique was used by the majority of China-linked hackers. Richard Horne, the centre’s chief executive, said on Wednesday that China’s intelligence and military agencies had an “eye-watering level of sophistication in their cyber-operations”
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