Meta Launches MCI — Will Log U.S. Employees' Keystrokes and Screens to Train AI Agents (April 2026)

Meta on April 21, 2026 confirmed it is rolling out an internal tool called the Model Capability Initiative (MCI) that captures U.S. employees' mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes and occasional screenshots to train its AI agents, according to internal memos from Meta Superintelligence Labs first reported by Reuters and confirmed by Fortune.

What happened

According to the memo, MCI runs on designated work applications and websites on U.S. employees' corporate laptops, records pointer movement, clicks and keystrokes, and takes occasional snapshots of the screen to give models context. Meta told staff the goal is to close gaps where current AI agents still struggle — dropdown menus, keyboard shortcuts, multi-window workflows — by training on real human traces of the same tasks.

A Meta spokesperson said: "If we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them." The company told employees the data "will not be used for performance assessments" and that unspecified "safeguards" will filter out sensitive content before anything is fed into model training.

Key details

• Announced: April 21, 2026, via internal Meta Superintelligence Labs memo surfaced by Reuters.
• Scope: U.S.-based employees only at launch; European staff are excluded because local law — Italy's Workers' Statute explicitly forbids keystroke monitoring for productivity, and German labor courts only permit it under suspicion of a serious criminal offense.
• Data captured: mouse movement, clicks, keystrokes and periodic screen snapshots on designated work apps and websites.
• Purpose: training computer-use AI agents under Meta Superintelligence Labs, competing with OpenAI's Codex computer-use and Anthropic's Claude computer-use features.
• Tool name: Model Capability Initiative, abbreviated MCI.
• Privacy claim: the data is siloed from HR, will not be used for performance reviews, and Meta says it has "safeguards" to protect sensitive content (the memo does not define what those safeguards are).

What people are saying

Coverage from Fortune, The Irish Times and Yahoo Finance described the move as extending to white-collar knowledge workers "a degree of real-time surveillance previously experienced only by delivery drivers and gig workers." Labor scholars quoted across the reporting flagged that U.S. federal law puts no cap on workplace monitoring — the only guardrails are state-level notice rules in Connecticut, Delaware and New York.

On Hacker News and r/cscareerquestions, reaction has leaned negative even from engineers sympathetic to AI training. The most upvoted concerns are that "safeguards" is undefined, that the same tracking could later be repurposed for performance review even if Meta currently promises it will not be, and that the policy creates a two-tier workforce in which U.S. Meta employees are trained on but their European colleagues are not. On Threads, Reuters' own post drew hundreds of replies, most of them skeptical of Meta's "training-only" framing.

What this means for developers

The rollout signals a new phase of "computer-use" AI training. Public web and chat data is saturated; the frontier labs now want interaction traces — the actual clicks, shortcuts and micro-decisions developers make while working. Expect other large employers to test similar programs under similar "training-only" framings in the coming quarters, and expect IT admins to start fielding questions about whether existing productivity tools (IDE telemetry, Windows Recall, endpoint management agents, JetBrains and VS Code plugins) will one day feed the same training pipelines.

For engineers inside Meta there is also a practical concern: work performed on personal side-projects on a corporate laptop, work done for side-consulting clients, or open-source contributions made from a work device will — under any reasonable reading of the memo — end up as training data. Meta has not disclosed an opt-out mechanism.

What's next

Meta has not yet disclosed the production start date of MCI, whether employees can opt out, or the specific filters that are supposed to redact "sensitive content." Lawmakers in the EU and California are expected to push back; CWA-affiliated tech workers have already raised the issue internally. The announcement also lands alongside a reported plan by CEO Mark Zuckerberg to spend up to $135 billion on AI capex in 2026 and to cut as much as 20% of Meta's workforce starting in May — a pairing that has not gone unnoticed inside the company.

Sources

• Fortune — Meta will start tracking employees' screens and keystrokes to train AI tools — lead news report
• GV Wire — Exclusive: Meta to Start Capturing Employee Mouse Movements, Keystrokes — Reuters wire re-host with full text
• The Irish Times — EU legal context on employee monitoring
• The Deep Dive — Meta tracks workers for AI — financial/market angle
• Yahoo Finance — Reuters republication with market reaction
• Reuters on Threads — original breaking-news post