Meta's AI agents failed — saving 60% of staff from layoffs
meta canceled project ot, a plan to cut workforce by 60% using ai agents, after the tech failed and employees revolted, signaling that autonomous agents are not yet ready to replace human knowledge workers.
meta ceo mark zuckerberg halted 'project ot', a secret initiative to shrink teams by up to 60% and replace them with 'virtual ai workers', because the agents were not productive enough and the plan sparked a mutiny. employees discovered that surveillance software tracking their keystrokes and mouse clicks was training the models intended to replace them, causing internal sentiment to crash from 74% to 55% and triggering widespread protests. the failure of this initiative serves as a reality check for the industry, proving that despite the hype, autonomous agents are currently too unreliable to execute complex knowledge work without human supervision.