In its latest manifesto, "The Future is for Everyone," Meta paints an ambitious vision of the coming decade: a world where superintelligence is democratized, eight-year-olds can code complex software, and personal AI tutors address societal inequality. The essay positions Meta not as a tech conglomerate but as a digital equalizer, framing the company as one wresting control of AI from elite institutions and delivering it directly to ordinary people. The manifesto aligns with Meta's strategy of releasing open-weight AI models, including its Llama series, which the company has positioned as a counterweight to closed systems from OpenAI and Google.

However, beneath the populist language and promises of "individual empowerment," critics argue the document reveals a fundamentally self-serving corporate strategy. Meta is selling a utopian future, but on closer inspection, it is constructing a new digital kingdom in which it controls the infrastructure. The manifesto arrives amid an industry-wide race toward artificial general intelligence, with major players including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic each publishing their own visions of a broadly beneficial AI future—a genre of corporate messaging that has become a hallmark of the current AI boom.

Skepticism around Meta's benevolence is not without precedent. Mark Zuckerberg recently drew public criticism after his private yacht reportedly ignored a distress call from a skiff that had run out of fuel.

The company has also faced repeated privacy and data security failures. In January of this year, a dataset containing personal information belonging to 17.5 million Instagram users surfaced on a dark web marketplace. The data had been scraped through an insecure API endpoint. Meta's privacy record has also attracted regulatory action in multiple jurisdictions, including a record 1.2 billion euro fine from Irish data protection authorities in 2023 over EU-US data transfers.

While Meta has poured resources into artificial intelligence—investing billions in GPUs and data center infrastructure—critics contend it has slashed investment in privacy, trust, and safety. Investigative reports by Swedish media revealed that sensitive video recordings captured by users' Meta AI glasses were transmitted to third-party human contractors for review and annotation. Contractors reported viewing highly sensitive footage, including images of people's bank details, individuals using the toilet, and people engaged in sexual activity.

Against this backdrop, the manifesto's promise of a 24/7 personal AI agent—one that understands a user's "relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies"—has drawn sharp scrutiny. Meta assures readers that such data will be safeguarded by "strong privacy and security options," comparing the protection to WhatsApp's encryption. However, Meta's core business model has long centered on the extraction and monetization of human attention and behavioral data. Critics describe the proposed "personal agent" as a Trojan horse: a seemingly helpful digital assistant designed to intermediate virtually every interaction a person has across both digital and physical environments.

The essay also addresses workforce concerns, suggesting that while individual companies may become smaller, the overall number of businesses will grow. Meta envisions a future in which small teams equipped with personal superintelligence agents can operate companies at significant scale. Small businesses, the manifesto argues, will remain the backbone of the economy, but each will be able to achieve a far greater impact. This framing echoes a broader Silicon Valley discourse around AI-driven productivity gains, though economists remain divided on whether such gains will be broadly distributed or concentrated among firms that control the underlying technology.

Critics have pushed back on this framing, questioning whether Meta's leadership is genuinely committed to democratizing AI in a benevolent manner given the company's track record on privacy and data practices.

Shares of Meta were up 2% amid the manifesto's release. Critics maintain that any information Meta gathers through its "superintelligence" initiatives will ultimately serve the same purpose that underpins all of its products: advertising.