Meta released Muse Spark 1.3, its most powerful AI model to date, which developers can access Wednesday. The company says it's narrowing the gap with leading competitors like OpenAI and Google.

• Developers get paid access to Muse Spark 1.3 starting Wednesday
• Meta plans to integrate the model into Instagram, Facebook, and Meta AI
• Meta's chief AI officer claims the model's capabilities are now closer to top competitors

Meta agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion to settle claims from 47 states and U.S. territories that its platforms harmed children through addictive design. The deal also requires the company to make significant changes to how its products operate.

• Settlement amount reaches $17.1 billion, one of the largest tech payouts ever
• 47 states plus D.C. and territories joined the lawsuit over child safety and addiction concerns
• Meta must implement product changes to address how its platforms engage users, particularly minors

Meta paused its Model Capability Initiative after an internal leak exposed employees’ private conversations, performance metrics, and keystroke logs across the company. The breach was rated SEV 2 on Meta’s 0–5 severity scale, prompting an investigation and a temporary suspension of the program.

• Meta paused its Model Capability Initiative (which recorded employee keystrokes/mouse movements for AI training) after a leak exposed private conversations, performance reviews, and transcription logs to all employees, rated SEV 2 on Meta's severity scale.
• Meta says there's no evidence the exposed data was abused, but is investigating how access controls failed.
• Employees are angry, saying Meta broke its promised privacy safeguards for a program that was already mandatory and controversial when launched in April.
• This follows other recent Meta security failures: an AI chatbot flaw that let attackers hijack Instagram accounts in May, and a rogue AI agent incident in March.

Meta’s leadership shifted from a “move-fast-with-stable-infra” model to enforcing mandatory AI tools, tracking engineers’ every keystroke and click without opt-outs. This aggressive push has turned its once-prized engineering org into a monitored cost center, sparking outages and internal chaos.

• Meta shifted from "move fast with stable infra" to mandatory, surveillance-heavy AI tool adoption, tracking engineers' keystrokes and clicks with no opt-out.
• The AI push turned engineering from a profit-driving function into a monitored cost center, causing outages and internal chaos.
• Massive AI spending (Llama models, $14.8B for 49% of Scale AI, a failed $2B Manus AI bid) coincides with mass reorgs and plummeting engineer morale.
• Leadership exhibits "AI psychosis," demanding AI-driven fixes for problems that don't actually exist, further alienating core engineers.

A Wired report reveals deep discontent within Meta’s three-month-old Applied AI team, where 6,500 employees were “drafted” into grueling data-labeling work or forced out. Internal outbursts, petitions against keystroke monitoring, and surprise reassignments have left engineers calling the unit a “soul-crushing gulag.” Leadership acknowledges the mistakes and low morale in an internal memo.

• Meta reassigned 6,500 engineers into an "Applied AI" unit to do data-labeling grunt work, with no real choice but to comply or quit, and morale has collapsed to the point employees call it a "soul-crushing gulag"
• Someone hacked a livestreamed internal presentation to call a senior AI executive "a piece of sh*t," reflecting broader anger over the forced reassignments
• Over 1,600 employees signed a petition opposing keystroke and click monitoring used to generate AI training data
• Zuckerberg and Chief Product Officer Chris Cox have both acknowledged internally that the situation is bad, with Cox calling the environment "brutal" and Zuckerberg admitting mistakes while promising fixes