META Parts Ways With Virtue AI Hires Just Four Months After Recruiting Them, Says Report

• Meta hired employees from AI safety startup Virtue AI in June, including co-founders Bo Li, Dawn Song and Sanmi Koyejo.
• Meta spokesperson Andy Stone attributed the departures to “clashing work styles” and said the arrangement did not work out as planned, Semafor reported.
• Virtue AI had previously worked with Anthropic, OpenAI and the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Meta Platforms Inc. (META) is reportedly letting go of employees it hired from AI security startup Virtue AI just four months after they joined the company in June, as the social media giant continues to shape its strategy around AI safety.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone attributed the departures to clashing work styles, while saying Meta Superintelligence Labs remains focused on AI safety, alignment and frontier risk, according to a report in Semafor.

At the time of writing on Friday afternoon, META stock was trading about 0.4% higher.

Meta Lets Go Of Virtue AI Hires

“Unfortunately, the arrangement didn’t work out as planned,” Stone told Semafor.

Axios reported in June that Virtue AI co-founders Bo Li, Dawn Song and Sanmi Koyejo were joining Meta. The hires also reportedly included members of Virtue AI’s broader team, which develops enterprise AI security tools spanning automated red teaming, runtime guardrails and AI governance.

The departures come four months after the team joined Meta and as the company continues to shape its approach to AI and AI safety amid new calls for regulation in Washington.

A Discrete Team Hire

According to the Axios report, the hiring was an example of Meta bringing in a discrete team rather than acquiring an entire company.

Virtue AI is an AI security startup that had previously done work with Anthropic, OpenAI, and the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

The hiring spree also marked an escalating arms race in Silicon Valley to secure specialized cybersecurity talent capable of defending autonomous systems.

META Stock: Stocktwits Retail View

Retail sentiment on Stocktwits for META was ‘neutral’ with ‘normal’ message volumes at the time of writing on Friday.

META stock has gained nearly 11% year-to-date. 

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