From what I can tell, they laid off people on teams that were doing fluff (from the perspective of the CFO)- things that don't contribute to the bottom line of products making money and mainly exist to help the company maintain its repuation for privacy, security, technology or whatever.

I've seen a few teams like this before and usually they don't really contribute to moving the ML field forward but mostly set themselves up as gatekeepers who make it hard to launch products (for better or worse- I certainly know if I'm an eng deploying ML I don't need some external team to tell me to consider the larger implications).