Meta hired an AI safety team. Four months later, it fired its co-founders and employees

Meta hired the co-founders of Virtue AI — Bo Li, Dawn Song and Sanmi Koyejo — into Meta Superintelligence Labs in June. Four months later, per peoplematters.in, it has parted ways with all three, plus other members of the team. A startup called Virtue spent one fiscal quarter inside Meta, which is either a land-speed record or a warning label on the box. The safety team's tenure was shorter than most gym memberships, and considerably more expensive.

A Meta spokesperson told Semafor the arrangement "didn't work out as planned." That sentence has now done service for failed space launches, abandoned mergers and at least one wedding, and it is doing it again — three researchers in and out before the quarterly all-hands could locate a meeting room. Note what survived the cull: Meta Superintelligence Labs "remains committed to work around AI safety, alignment and frontier risk." The commitment is thriving. The commitment requires no salary, no desk, and no awkward conversation about what frontier risk might mean for a company explicitly named after superintelligence.

Four months is a probation period, and the thing apparently on probation was safety. Dawn Song, Bo Li and Sanmi Koyejo are out the door; the press office remains fully staffed. You can hire the alignment people in June, lose them by October, and still issue a statement about frontier risk, because in this industry the statement is the deliverable. Virtue AI managed four months inside Meta — roughly the time it takes to get a security badge reprinted, and about the same amount of paperwork. The commitment survives. The people don't. Everyone involved will describe this as not working out as planned, and everyone will be telling the truth. If you wanted a demonstration of how seriously the industry treats alignment headcount, you now have one, and it cost you nothing but June, July, August and September.