How AI Is Ushering in the Next Era of Risk Review at Meta

Meta on March 31, 2026 said it is rebuilding its product-review workflow around AI, turning what had been a Privacy Review process into a broader company-wide Risk Review program. The company says the goal is to address privacy, safety, security, and legal concerns earlier in product development and to do that work more consistently across the scale of its product portfolio.

Why Meta changed the process

Meta says it conducts tens of thousands of risk and compliance reviews each year, and that the older process required significant manual effort from experts who had to gather information, fill standard forms, and start reviews from scratch. The company argues that this model became difficult to sustain as both regulation and product complexity increased.

In the new setup, Meta says AI can prefill key documentation, surface relevant product requirements, and scan product proposals for possible issues or coding gaps before development reaches the testing phase. The company describes the system as an always-on risk detection tool that helps teams identify problems while code is still being written rather than after launch decisions are already close.

What Meta says improves

Meta lists several concrete effects: earlier signals during development, more consistent application of standards and safeguards, more time for experts to focus on novel or high-impact cases, ongoing monitoring as products evolve, and faster adaptation to changing legal requirements. The company also says AI helps it cross-check products and features against a global library of privacy and regulatory obligations.

Human review stays central

Meta is explicit that AI is not replacing human judgment. Instead, it says AI performs a first pass and supports experts, who remain responsible for oversight, accuracy checks, and hard decisions. That distinction matters because the company is presenting the system as operational governance infrastructure, not just a productivity tool. In practice, Meta is arguing that AI can help large product organizations apply safety and privacy controls earlier and more consistently without removing expert accountability from the process.