GitHub 'Colleague.Skill' Project Raises Job Loss and Privacy Concerns in China
A GitHub project called 'Colleague.Skill' that launched in March 2026 enables users to create AI clones of workers based on their communications and work documents. Reports indicate the system extracts and replicates employees' professional knowledge and decision-making patterns, raising concerns about job displacement and the closure of career development pathways for younger workers.
What happened
On March 30, 2026, a GitHub project titled 'Colleague.Skill' went online and gained thousands of stars within three days. The project enables users to input ex-colleagues' Feishu messages, DingTalk documents, work emails, and screenshots as raw material to generate AI skills that can replicate the colleague's work.
The AI system replicates an employee's technical standards, communication tone, decision-making logic, and behavioral patterns. Users can create variations including 'boss.skill', 'mentor.skill', 'parent.skill', and 'ex.skill'. An 'anti-distill' tool was subsequently developed to create sanitized versions of skills while preserving sensitive knowledge privately.
Reported impact
Workers reported concerns that their specialized knowledge, judgment logic, and professional experience—elements that make them irreplaceable—can be easily extracted and distilled into AI systems. According to reporting, companies previously required employees to systematically document workflows and decision logic under the guise of 'knowledge management', and these documents were subsequently used to train AI systems that displaced the workers.
The project was described as a 'collective trauma expressed through self-mockery,' reflecting broader workplace practices where organizations extract employee knowledge for AI training. Researchers and young professionals expressed concern that entry-level positions crucial for career development—such as coding, running models, and data analysis—are being replaced by AI, potentially closing pathways for developing new talent. A 2025 Anthropic report noted a near-20% employment decline for 22-25 year-olds in AI-exposed occupations since ChatGPT's release.
Index analysis
The controversy highlighted a gap between technical capability and labor law. Professional analysts noted that AI learning and replication of workers' accumulated experience and proprietary methodologies falls into labor law rather than traditional privacy or intellectual property categories. Beijing's Human Resources and Social Security Bureau had previously ruled that dismissing employees because their positions were replaced by AI constituted a violation of labor law.
Governance controls
Beijing's Human Resources and Social Security Bureau issued a ruling that companies cannot legally dismiss employees on grounds that their positions have been replaced by AI, characterizing such dismissals as illegal and constituting an unlawful transfer of normal technological risk to workers.
Classification
Sources and evidence
Sources not yet published
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