{"id":1040115,"date":"2026-09-03T03:42:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T03:42:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1040115\/"},"modified":"2026-09-03T03:42:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T03:42:15","slug":"meta-pushes-its-new-ai-agent-on-employees-but-eases-off-on-tokenmaxxing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1040115\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta Pushes Its New AI Agent on Employees\u2014but Eases Off on Tokenmaxxing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Meta is formally ending what amounted to a tokenmaxxing<\/a> incentive program for employees. In an internal announcement this week, the social media giant told workers that their performance evaluations would no longer be dependent upon how much they used AI tools<\/a>, three employees who received the message tell WIRED. But as Meta workers simultaneously begin testing a new agentic AI tool known as Hatch, they say their token consumption continues to surge.<\/p>\n

Almost a year ago, Meta had said workers would be graded on their “AI-driven impact,\u201d which in practice meant evaluating the extent to which they used chatbots and agents to improve their day-to-day work, Business Insider reported at the time<\/a>. Usage correlated with employees receiving labels such as \u201cAI Native,\u201d \u201cAI First,\u201d or \u201cAI Enabled,\u201d according to a lawsuit<\/a> filed in July by about two dozen employees arguing that Meta violated US antidiscrimination laws when laying them off in May. (Workers on health and family leaves say they couldn\u2019t accumulate usage and were unfairly penalized as a result; Meta has denied the allegations in the ongoing case.)<\/p>\n

New guidance for performance reviews unveiled this week replaces references to evaluating employees based on criteria like \u201cusage of AI\u201d and their \u201cAI Native\u201d designation, with looser wording, which caveats that \u201cthese outcomes can be supported by AI or other means.\u201d It restores Meta\u2019s focus to grading employees on their impact, with less regard to how it is achieved. Some Meta employees tell WIRED the changes are subtle but welcome, freeing them from feeling pressured to use AI in situations in which it doesn\u2019t make sense.<\/p>\n

Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton tells WIRED that the updates this week aim to emphasize what has always been the case\u2014Meta evaluates employees based on their contributions. He adds that labels such as \u201cAI Native\u201d were never used for performance evaluation. Engineers across the company were told this week that the company \u201cwill not use AI adoption dashboards or token counts to evaluate impact,\u201d The Information reported<\/a> on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

For months, some Meta employees say, their colleagues prompted AI tools repeatedly\u2014or what they viewed as frivolously\u2014to maximize internal usage measurements, like the amount of tokens<\/a>, or AI units, they consumed. The tokenmaxxing era reached a high point when one Meta worker created an internal leaderboard for tracking how much employees used AI, labeling them as, for example, a \u201cToken Legend.\u201d After details of the dashboard leaked<\/a>, the employee took it<\/a> down in April. A couple of months later, Meta moved to ration<\/a> employees\u2019 AI usage.<\/p>\n

More recently, Meta has been encouraging\u2014but not requiring\u2014employees to use its most advanced AI experiment, an agentic tool that can autonomously carry out actions on a computer. Known as Hatch<\/a> and similar to the viral sensation OpenClaw<\/a>, it can browse the web and operate other applications. Employees have been able to test Hatch for the past several weeks on their corporate devices ahead of an expected public release.<\/p>\n

Some employees have been hesitant to connect Hatch to their personal email, calendar, and other nonwork digital accounts because of privacy worries, as well the possibility that the AI could mess up something important, two current Meta employees familiar with the concerns tell WIRED. Meta previously ran a project that tracked employees\u2019 keystrokes and other activity on their work devices to collect data for training AI systems. The project, which Meta has since paused<\/a>, eroded many employees\u2019 trust in the company\u2019s AI tools, the sources say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Meta is formally ending what amounted to a tokenmaxxing incentive program for employees. In an internal announcement this…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1040116,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[21],"tags":[4487,691,738,7988,1066,606,340,158,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-1040115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-agentic-ai","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-employees","tag-facebook","tag-labor","tag-meta","tag-technology","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117205044122105917","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1040115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1040115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1040115\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1040116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1040115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1040115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1040115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}