Inside the revolt at Meta's Applied AI unit

This article was published on June 18, 2026 An employee hijacked a company-wide livestream to insult an executive. It was the loudest sign yet that Applied AI, the 6,500-person unit built to power Mark Zuckerberg's most expensive AI bet, has become what staff call "the gulag". It takes a particular kind of dysfunction for an employee to hijack a company-wide livestream and demand the hosts pass a message to a senior executive: that he is, in not so many words, garbage. That happened inside Meta this month. According to a recording heard by WIRED, the outburst, on a call open to thousands of staff, was not really about one executive. It was the loudest signal yet of how badly things have soured inside Applied AI, the roughly 6,500-person unit Mark Zuckerberg built in March to power his most expensive bet in artificial intelligence. “It’s literally the gulag,” one employee told WIRED. “You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden.” That bet has a name: Alexandr Wang. Last summer, Meta paid $14.3bn for a 49 per cent stake in Wang’s data-labelling startup, Scale AI, and installed the young founder as its chief AI officer, leading the new Meta Superintelligence Labs. Applied AI is the