The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropic organization founded by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, has embarked on a significant restructuring, recalibrating its focus toward AI-powered biomedical research. This strategic shift, which began to take shape in 2025, has resulted in a reduction of approximately 70 positions, representing about 8% of the organization’s workforce. These layoffs primarily affected staff at CZI’s Redwood City headquarters in San Mateo, California, as the organization seeks to align its team with its evolving mission.
This recalibration reflects a broader trend among major philanthropic entities, with large donors increasingly backing science-heavy, technology-centric projects. Zuckerberg himself emphasized this new direction during a November event at the Biohub Imaging Institute, stating, “I feel like the science work that we’ve done, the Biohub model in particular, has been the most impactful thing that we have done. So we want to really double down on that. Biohub is going to be the main focus of our philanthropy going forward.” This sentiment underscores a notable departure from the couple’s earlier emphasis on education and social justice initiatives, though support for local organizations will continue. The couple has committed, through the Giving Pledge, to donate 99% of their lifetime wealth.
The decision to streamline the workforce was a direct consequence of this strategic reorientation. While some employees were reassigned to other teams within CZI, the organization found itself in need of a different skill set—one more oriented towards intensive research. The departing employees received a 60-day notice period, a severance package including 16 weeks of base pay, health insurance, and a $10,000 stipend to assist with other needs. The organization anticipates continuing to hire, but with a clear preference for roles such as researchers, data scientists, and computational biologists, all crucial for its new scientific endeavors.
At the heart of this renewed focus is Biohub, a network of biomedical research institutes with an ambitious goal: to “cure or prevent all disease.” Established in 2016, Biohub operates as a collaborative network, partnering with prominent universities including UC San Francisco, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Northwestern, and Columbia. Its mission centers on advancing biomedical science, engineering, and artificial intelligence to ultimately cure, prevent, or manage a wide array of diseases. Since Biohub’s inception, Zuckerberg and Chan have already contributed $4 billion to basic science research, with plans to double that amount over the next decade. The initiative currently operates with an annual budget of approximately $1 billion.
The aggressive move into AI-powered biology mirrors the trajectory of Zuckerberg’s commercial enterprise, Meta, which is also making substantial investments in artificial intelligence. Both his business and philanthropic ventures are now squarely centered on AI, with Meta projecting expenditures between $115 billion and $135 billion on developing “superintelligent” agents for various user applications. Similarly, CZI’s Biohub is exploring “frontier AI” and “frontier biology,” utilizing large-scale models for applications such as virtual cells, immune reprogramming, and disease prediction. Zuckerberg has publicly framed 2026 as a transformative year for AI’s influence across both Meta and CZI. As the couple articulated in a November blog post, “Accelerating science is the most positive impact we think we can make. So we’re going all in on AI-powered biology for our next chapter.” This commitment signifies a profound shift in one of the world’s most prominent philanthropic organizations, aiming to leverage advanced technology for monumental scientific breakthroughs.
