Sama loses its Meta contract and reportedly closes in Kenya and Uganda
Sama, the company at the center of TIME's 2023 story (B05-26), issued redundancy notices on 2026-04-16 to 1,108 employees at its Nairobi delivery center after Meta ended a major content-moderation…
- Date
- 17 April 2026
- Who
- Sama, Meta
- Confidence
- Medium (the layoffs, which several press reports cover); Low (the 2026-09-15 clo
- Deep dive
- RLHF and instruction tuning (how base models became assistants)
Tier: Supporting · Significance: 3/5 · Org(s): Sama, Meta · Confidence: Medium (the layoffs, which several press reports cover); Low (the 2026-09-15 closure, which I found only in Wikipedia's uncited text) Sama, the company at the center of TIME's 2023 story (B05-26), issued redundancy notices on 2026-04-16 to 1,108 employees at its Nairobi delivery center after Meta ended a major content-moderation and data-annotation contract, reported by HapaKenya on 2026-04-17 and by the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, which cites The Kenya Wall Street (HapaKenya; Business & Human Rights Resource Centre). The termination followed reporting that Sama annotators in Nairobi had reviewed intimate footage captured by Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses, first published on 2026-02-27 by Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten and followed by Ars Technica on 2026-03-05 (as I understand it from search results; I did not open those articles), and HapaKenya reports a Kenyan data-protection investigation and the older moderator lawsuits against Sama and Meta continuing. Wikipedia says Sama ended operations in Kenya and Uganda on 2026-09-15, without a citation; treat that as unconfirmed (Wikipedia)). It belongs here as a continuation of the Sama story in B05-26. The 2026 episode concerns Meta's smart-glasses data. It is separate from the 2021-22 OpenAI work on RLHF for ChatGPT, and the two should not be conflated. Sources: HapaKenya · Business & Human Rights Resource Centre · Wikipedia, Sama)