Meta will now allow US government agencies and contractors to use its open source Llama AI model for “national security applications”. In an announcement Mondaythe company said it was working with Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Oracle and others to make Llama available to the government.
Below Meta’s “Acceptable Use Policy” people cannot use the latest Llama 3 model for “military, war, nuclear industries or applications, espionage”. However, as Meta explains, this update opens the door for the US military to use Llama to do things like “streamline complicated logistics and planning, track terrorist financing, or strengthen our cyber defenses.”
Meta says Oracle has already started relying on Llama to “summarize” maintenance documents to help aircraft technicians perform repairs, while Lockheed Martin uses the model to generate code and analyze data. The company hinted that it would make its AI model available to the government during the third quarter earnings conference call.
Last week, a report of Reuters revealed that Chinese researchers used Meta’s Llama 2 model to build an AI system for the country’s military. At the time, a Meta spokesperson said Reuters that “the alleged role of a single, outdated version of an open source American model is irrelevant when we know that China is already investing more than a trillion dollars to surpass the United States in AI” .
In his article, Meta outlined the importance of the United States getting ahead of the AI race, saying it is “in the best interests of America and the broader democratic world that American open source models excel and succeed compared to models from China and elsewhere.” Other AI companies are also getting involved with the military, with a report of The interception revealing that US Africa Command purchased cloud computing services from Microsoft, providing access to OpenAI tools. Google DeepMind also has a cloud computing contract with the Israeli government.