Meta installed software on thousands of U.S. employee laptops to record every mouse movement, keystroke and screen interaction. The goal? Gather real-world examples to train AI agents that mimic human computer use. Workers responded with flyers in bathrooms, petitions and pointed internal posts. The backlash reveals deep tensions at a company racing to build artificial intelligence while shrinking its workforce. The program, known internally as the Model Capability Initiative or MCI, began rolling out in April. It captures clicks, button navigation, dropdown selections and periodic screen snapshots when employees work in approved applications such as Gmail, chat tools or code editors. Meta told staff the data would stay limited to training purposes with safeguards in place. Many didn’t buy it. “Selfishly, I don’t want my screen scraped because it feels like an invasion of my privacy,” one engineer wrote in an internal post viewed by nearly 20,000 colleagues.…