Meta Re-Backs AI: Zuckerberg Writes Code with Claude, Employees Kick Off a Token Consumption Battle to Hit KPIs

Meta is going all-in on AI, with Zuckerberg personally using Claude Code to write code. To hit KPIs, an internal token-spending frenzy has erupted, wasting resources. Learning from the lesson of the metaverse’s $80 billion loss, Meta is actively acquiring startups, hoping to turn its technology into tangible value.

Meta is going all-in on AI: Zuckerberg is using Claude Code to write code

Meta, the tech giant that owns social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, is recently putting the company’s resources fully into the generative AI space.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has begun personally using an AI code-writing tool, Claude Code, to produce code—breaking his record of many years without directly taking part in development.

External media also reported that a token-consuming competition has recently emerged inside Meta. Many engineers have boosted their individual performance metrics (KPIs) by consuming large amounts of tokens.

AI coding is all the rage, founders are returning to the front lines of development

In March 2026, Zuckerberg submitted three code diffs to Meta’s single repository. This is his first substantive code contribution in 20 years.

Zuckerberg uses an AI coding assistant, the Claude Code CLI, developed by Anthropic. On one submission, it received approvals from more than 200 engineers.

His actions reflect that AI coding tools are attracting corporate founders back into system development. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan has also returned to coding work after 15 years, and open-sourced a system that combines Claude Code.

According to internal documents leaked by Meta in March 2026, the company has set ambitious goals, planning that by the mid-point of 2026, 65% of engineers will use AI to write 75% or more of their code.

Image source: flickr, Niall Kennedy photographed Meta founder Zuckerberg speaking at the Facebook F8 developer conference in September 2011

Meta’s internal token-spending contest turns KPIs into a performance

To drive the adoption of generative AI applications, Meta has spawned a phenomenon inside the company that links token usage to productivity. Tokens are the smallest units that large language models use to process text; in Chinese, they are often referred to as “char symbols” or “tokens.”

《The Information》 reports that inside Meta there is a leaderboard called Claudeonomics, tracking the amount of AI token consumption of more than 85k employees. The data shows that employees consumed as many as 60 trillion tokens in just 30 days—making them number one. The average user at the top consumed 281 billion tokens.

The leaderboard also sets up titles such as Token Legend, encouraging employees to integrate AI tools into their day-to-day work.

《Forbes》 reports that Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth has previously mentioned that a top engineer consumed a token amount equal to his annual salary. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has also said that if an engineer earning $500k fails to consume tokens valued at $250k, he would be concerned.

However, this KPI system that drives internal competition for token consumption also brings drawbacks. Some Meta employees, in order to boost performance numbers, leave AI agent programs running idle for hours, causing a waste of computing resources.

In addition, treating employees’ token consumption directly as a productivity metric makes consumption behavior turn into a show, creating challenges for performance evaluations that lack support from tangible business results.

Learn from the metaverse failure experience—Meta’s next challenge in the AI race

Before making a massive investment in AI, the metaverse area Meta had bet on ended in failure. The company previously spent about $8 billion building the virtual world Horizon Worlds and VR/MR equipment, and even changed the company name to “Meta,” yet still failed to reach the market-expected scale of users.

In comments on a social platform about the development of blockchain games and the metaverse, Solana Foundation President Lily Liu also expressed a pessimistic view of the virtual economy model in the past, saying it lacked substantial content support.

Image source: Meta Meta metaverse platform Horizon Worlds—In the original version, Zuckerberg’s virtual avatar shown

Now Meta is shifting its focus to AI and actively laying out its market strategy. In addition to launching its own large language model LLaMA, it is also gradually advancing a named AI model project called “Avocado.”

Recent 《Axios》 reporting also revealed that Meta has acquired Moltbook, a proxy community often dubbed the “Reddit of AI.” Moltbook founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr will join Meta’s team.

• **Related report:**The Lobster community was bought! It’s rumored that Meta acquired Moltbook—founders successfully transitioned from media to AI

Outsiders are also watching whether Meta can avoid repeating the metaverse’s pattern of over-investing without substantial application results—and whether it can turn the current internal token-consuming frenzy and acquisition deals targeting startups like Moltbook into real products with commercial value, so it can gain a foothold in the intensely competitive generative AI market.