Meta forced thousands of engineers into AI training work. Now it’s giving some a way out.

Meta is walking back its stance on forcing engineers to join a task force focused on AI training, according to an internal memo obtained by Business Insider and four people familiar with the matter.

Last month, Meta reassigned 7,000 employees to units such as an Applied AI task force to help train Meta’s coming AI models.

On Wednesday, Meta sent a memo about this task force, saying the company will now “defer to each individual’s choice.” The company sent the email to employees who had been “drafted,” as some described its Applied AI task force. “As I emphasized before, personal agency will remain at the heart of all opportunities at Meta: we will support employees in whatever decisions they make,” the memo said. “Of course, we’d prefer everyone to stay and push to SOTA together, but we defer to each individual’s choice,” it read, referring to state-of-the-art.

The memo went on to say that people in the unit would have preferential placement in other parts of the company due to staffing shortages.

Meta declined to comment for this story.

Some employees on Blind called the memo an “undraft.” The task force faced significant backlash last month from employees who compared the job to data labeling.

The reversal comes after chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth addressed a broader morale crisis at the company.

During an internal “Tuesdays with Boz” session on June 2, Bosworth told employees that morale was “probably one of the worst it’s ever been” in Meta’s 20-year history, Business Insider previously reported.

In May, Meta laid off 10% of its staff, or 8,000 people.

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