Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg held an all-hands meeting Thursday and his comments leaked to multiple outlets almost immediately. That led Meta’s Chief Information Security Officer Guy Rosen to send staff an internal memo later that day reminding them that the company had recently fired staffers who leaked information and would continue to fight back against them.
“We take leaks seriously and will take action,” Rosen said in the memo to staff, which has since been leaked to The Verge. “When information is stolen or leaked, there are repercussions beyond the immediate security impact. Our teams become demoralized and we all waste time that is better spent working on our products and toward our goals and mission.”
Mark Zuckerberg. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Meta “recently terminated relationships with employees who leaked confidential company information” and will continue to “take appropriate action, including termination” if it finds out an employee spilled information, Rosen wrote.
Here’s what happened at the all-hands meeting leading to the memo on Thursday, according to reports:
Zuckerberg warns staff to stop leaking information
Zuckerberg led the meeting by saying that he wouldn’t be as open as he had been at previous meetings, due to the leaks. Human resources also chimed in and told employees that they would skip questions that they’d expect “might be unproductive if they leak.”
“We try to be really open and then everything I say leaks,” Zuckerberg reportedly said. “It sucks.”
Zuckerberg talks layoffs, AI replacing humans
At the meeting, Zuckerberg addressed Meta’s upcoming layoffs, which will affect 5% of the company or about 3,600 employees on February 10. The cuts will be based on performance and affect employees who aren’t meeting expectations.
“The right thing to do is just rip the band-aid off,” Zuckerberg said. “I think in a lot of ways it is a nicer thing to do for people who are probably not going to end up making it anyway.”
Related: Meta Is Laying Off More Than 3,000 as CEO Mark Zuckerberg Calls for ‘Extensive Performance-Based Cuts’
Zuckerberg also said that this year, Meta would use AI agents, or software that can carry out tasks autonomously, to write new code at the company.
The comments echo what Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan earlier this month: Meta is working on AI this year that can function as well as a midlevel engineer.
When asked at the all-hands meeting if this new AI could lead to layoffs, Zuckerberg did not confirm job cuts, stating that it was difficult to tell. He said that Meta is still going to need engineers, especially those who can use AI to be more productive.
Meta will keep spending on AI despite DeepSeek
Zuckerberg additionally spoke about DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup that created an open-source AI model on par with Meta’s for less than $6 million. Meanwhile, Meta committed $60 billion to $65 billion this year on AI infrastructure investments.
He said that he doesn’t think DeepSeek changes how much Meta is spending on AI, but that it is “interesting when there’s someone who does something better than you.”
“We can not only observe what they [DeepSeek] did, but we can read about it and implement it, so that’ll benefit us,” Zuckerberg said.
Related: Meta Is Building AI That Can Write Code Like a Mid-Level Engineer, According to Mark Zuckerberg
