More than 700 workers at Covalen, the Dublin-based contractor that handles content moderation and data labeling for Meta, were told on Monday afternoon that their jobs are at risk, according to documents obtained by Wired. Roughly 500 of them are data annotators whose day job is training Meta's AI models to recognize the company's rules against dangerous and illegal content. The notice came in a brief video meeting in which staff were not permitted to ask questions, employee Nick Bennett told Wired.
It is the second round of cuts at Covalen in six months. The firm announced roughly 400 layoffs in November, which culminated in a worker strike. Between the two rounds, Covalen's Dublin headcount is on track to be almost halved, per the Communications Workers' Union, which represents some of the affected staff.
The timing tracks with Meta's own restructuring. Last week Meta said it would cut one in 10 jobs in a sweeping efficiency push, while telling staff in an internal memo that it needs to redirect spending — including a near-doubling of AI investment. In January, Mark Zuckerberg said, "I think that 2026 is going to be the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work."
Key facts
- 01More than 700 Covalen employees in Dublin were told on Monday their jobs are at risk, per documents reviewed by Wired.
- 02Roughly 500 of those workers are data annotators who train Meta's AI on content-moderation rules.
- 03Meta announced last week it would cut one in 10 jobs across the company as it raises AI spending.
- 04Covalen previously cut around 400 roles in November, putting its Dublin headcount on track to nearly halve.
- 05Laid-off Covalen staff face a six-month cooldown barring them from applying to competing Meta vendors, the CWU says.
Meta spokesperson Erica Sackin tied the Covalen cuts directly to that shift. "As we shared in March, over the next few years, Meta will be deploying more advanced AI systems to transform our approach to content enforcement and operations across our platforms, so that it delivers the safety and protection people expect," Sackin said. "As we do that, we'll be reducing our reliance on third-party vendors and strengthening our internal systems."
“Between November's roughly 400 cuts and this week's notice to more than 700 staff, Covalen's Dublin headcount is on track to be almost halved.”— Jaeden Schafer
The Covalen email seen by Wired was less direct, citing only "reduced demand and operational requirements." Workers on the call read the subtext clearly enough. "It's essentially training the AI to take over our jobs," one Covalen employee, who asked not to be named, told Wired. "We take actions as the perfect decision for the AI to emulate."
The work itself is brutal. Annotators routinely write adversarial prompts designed to push Meta's models into producing the worst content imaginable — child sexual abuse material, suicide instructions — so the guardrails can be hardened against those exact attacks. "It's quite a grueling job," Bennett said. "You spend your whole day pretending to be a pedophile." That those jobs are now being phased out in favor of the systems they helped build is the part workers are calling undignified.
The job hunt for those laid off will not be straightforward. The CWU says affected Covalen workers face a six-month cooldown period during which they cannot apply to a competing Meta vendor — a meaningful constraint in Dublin, where Meta-adjacent moderation work is concentrated among a small number of outsourcing firms. "It's undignified, you know," one anonymous employee told Wired. "It's rude."
Unions are pushing Covalen to negotiate severance terms and want a meeting with the Irish government on how AI is reshaping the country's labor market. Christy Hoffman, general secretary of UNI Global Union, framed it as a structural fight. "Tech companies are treating the workers whose labor and data helped build AI as disposable," Hoffman said. "Workers should also have the right to refuse to train their AI replacements."
Whether organizing actually changes the outcome is the open question. Covalen did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Bennett, for one, sounded resigned. "It's a universal battle between downtrodden white-collar workers and big capital, really," he said. "That normally only goes one way."
The Covalen cuts make concrete what tends to get abstracted in earnings calls. Meta's pitch to investors is that more advanced AI will let it police its platforms with fewer humans in the loop, and the savings flow back into model spend. The first measurable expression of that trade is 700-plus jobs in Dublin, at a vendor whose entire purpose was to teach those models what counts as harmful in the first place. The annotators are not collateral damage to the AI buildout — they are its training set.
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