Mark Zuckerberg told employees at a closed-door town hall in California on 2 July 2026 that Meta's AI push 'hasn't really accelerated in the way that we expected' in the past four months, according to leaked audio of the meeting, exposing what critics now call a $145 billion AI lie built on mass layoffs and brutal internal restructuring.
The admission came less than two months after Meta laid off around 8,000 staff and reoriented the company around artificial intelligence, with Zuckerberg declaring in a May memo that 'AI is the most consequential technology of our lifetimes' and that the firms that lead would 'define the next generation.' He framed those cuts as the painful but necessary price of winning the AI arms race. Now the leaked audio suggests the promised acceleration has, at best, stalled.
