Meta has laid off a group of employees hired from AI safety company Virtue AI in June this year. The collaboration lasted about four months. Spokesperson Andy Stone told Semafor that the arrangement did not develop as planned due to conflicts in work style.

Stone added that Meta Superintelligence Labs will continue to focus on AI safety, alignment, and frontier risks. Semafor did not specify the names of those laid off, nor did it confirm whether co-founders Dawn Song, Bo Li, and Sanmi Koyejo were on the departure list. The Virtue AI team did not immediately respond when the report was released.

Axios reported on June 25, 2026, that Meta hired three co-founders and some employees, rather than acquiring the entire company, with terms undisclosed. An internal memo stated that the company delivers products to billions and is developing more capable agents, with system safety, reliability, and trustworthiness as the foundation. Li and Song reported to Superintelligence Labs executive Nat Friedman, while Koyejo reported to FAIR head Rob Fergus.

Virtue AI develops enterprise-side safety tools, including automated red teaming, runtime protection, and governance. Semafor noted that the company had previously worked with Anthropic, OpenAI, and the NIST under the U.S. Department of Commerce. Song is a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining, she told English media that the goal of agents is not to replace humans but to help them complete economically valuable work in real-world domains.

This hiring took place against the backdrop of strengthening agent safety. Axios reported that after the release of Anthropic's latest model, it was retracted, and labs were enhancing agent safety. Meta has opted to poach teams rather than buy companies. In March of this year, it also poached the founders of the AI startup Dreamer instead of acquiring the entire company.

The buyer was Meta, which aimed to use external safety teams to supplement the risks of agent deployment, while the seller was Virtue AI, whose personnel were separated. Four months later, the personnel were returned, and neither money nor positions remained with this team. The narrative of benefit is left to the safety structure still in the lab, while the startup team, which had just moved into a large company process, is under pressure. The specifics of disagreements, compensation, and the number of contract terminations have not been disclosed.

Semafor placed this incident alongside new regulatory calls in Washington, but the report did not provide new bill texts or penalties. The only public facts are that there were work style incompatibilities and that the arrangement did not proceed as planned.

Source: Public information