Mark Lemley, a Stanford professor and prominent Bay Area lawyer, dumped Meta as a client in its legal battle over copyrights after Zuckerberg's policy changes.

A lawyer representing Meta in a copyright case said he was dropping the company as a client due to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “descent into toxic masculinity.” The move comes as employees and associates of the social media company grapple with their founder’s apparent attempts to pivot rightward before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration next week.

The AI rush has brought with it thorny questions of copyright and ownership of data as tech companies train bots like ChatGPT on existing texts, but it seems Meta largely brushed these aside as they worked to integrate such tools into Facebook and Instagram.

Bloomberg reviewed the internal memo explaining the cuts, which was posted to Meta's internal Workplace forum Tuesday. In it, Zuckerberg confirmed that Meta was shifting its strategy to "move out low performers faster" so that Meta can hire new talent to fill those vacancies this year.

According to Bloomberg, Zuckerberg made the announcement via a company memo posted on the company's internal Workplace forum this week.