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Meta wants to get the U.S. government using its AI—even the military.
The company said yesterday it had assembled a smorgasbord of partners for this effort, including consultancies like Accenture and Deloitte, cloud providers like Microsoft and Oracle, and defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Palantir.
Policy chief Nick Clegg wrote in a blog post that Oracle was tweaking Meta’s Llama AI model to “synthesize aircraft maintenance documents so technicians can more quickly and accurately diagnose problems,” while Lockheed Martin is using it for code generation and data analysis. Scale AI, a defense contractor that happens to count Meta among its investors, is “fine-tuning Llama to support specific national security team missions, such as planning operations and identifying adversaries’ vulnerabilities.”
“As an American company, and one that owes its success in no small part to the entrepreneurial spirit and democratic values the United States upholds, Meta wants to play its part to support the safety, security, and economic prosperity of America—and of its closest allies too,” trilled the former British deputy prime minister.
But Clegg’s post wasn’t just about positioning Meta AI as the patriot’s choice. Perhaps more than anything else, it was an attempt to frame Meta’s version of open-source AI as the correct and desirable one.
Meta has always pitched Llama as “open source,” in the sense that it gives away not only the model but also its weights—the parameters that make it easier to modify—along with various other safety tools and resources.
Many in the traditional open-source software community have disagreed with Meta’s “open source” framing, mainly because the company doesn’t disclose the training data that it uses to create its Llama models, and because it places restrictions on Llama’s use—most pertinently in the context of Monday’s announcement, Llama’s license says it’s not supposed to be used in military applications.
The Open Source Initiative, which came up with the term “open source” and continues to act as its steward, recently issued a definition of open-source AI that clearly doesn’t apply to Llama for these reasons. Ditto the Linux Foundation, whose equally fresh definition isn’t exactly the same as the OSI’s, but still plainly demands information about training data, and the ability for anyone at all to reuse and improve the model.
Which is probably why Clegg’s post (which invokes “open source” 13 times in its body) proposes that Llama’s U.S. national security deployments “will not only support the prosperity and security of the United States, they will also help establish U.S. open source standards in the global race for AI leadership.” Per Clegg, a “global open source standard for AI models” is coming—think Android but for AI—and it “will form the foundation for AI development around the world and become embedded in technology, infrastructure and manufacturing, and global finance and e-commerce.”
If the U.S. drops the ball, Clegg suggests, China’s take on open-source AI will become that global standard.
However, the timing of this lobbying extravaganza is slightly awkward, as it comes just a few days after Reuters reported that Chinese military-linked researchers have used a year-old version of Llama as the basis for ChatBIT, a tool for processing intelligence and aiding operational decision-making. This is kind of what Meta is now letting military contractors do with Llama in the U.S., only without its permission.
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about how big an impact Llama’s sinicization will actually have. Given the hectic pace of AI development, the version of Llama in question (13B) is far from cutting-edge. Reuters says ChatBIT “was found to outperform some other AI models that were roughly 90% as capable as OpenAI's powerful ChatGPT-4,” but it’s not clear what “capable” means here. It’s not even clear if ChatBIT is actually being used.
“In the global competition on AI, the alleged role of a single, and outdated, version of an American open-source model is irrelevant when we know China is already investing more than $1 trillion to surpass the U.S. technologically, and Chinese tech companies are releasing their own open AI models as fast—or faster—than companies in the U.S.,” Meta said in a statement responding to the Reuters piece.
Not everyone is so convinced that the Llama-ChatBIT connection is irrelevant. The U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party made clear on X that it has taken note of the story. The chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), also tweeted that the CCP “exploiting U.S. AI applications like Meta's Llama for military use” demonstrated the need for export controls (in the form of the ENFORCE Act bill) to “keep American AI out of China’s hands.”
Meta’s Monday announcement isn’t likely to have been a reaction to this episode—that would be a heck of lot of partnerships to assemble in a couple days—but it is also clearly motivated in part by the sort of reaction that followed the Reuters story.
There are live battles not only for the definition of “open-source AI,” but also for the concept’s survival in the face of the U.S.-China geopolitical struggle. And these two battles are connected. As the Linux Foundation explained in a 2021 whitepaper, open-source encryption software can fall foul of U.S. export restrictions—unless it’s made “publicly available without restrictions on its further dissemination.”
Meta certainly wouldn’t love to see the same logic applied to AI—but, in this case, it may be far more difficult to convince the U.S. that a truly open “open source” AI standard is in its national security interest.
More news below.
David Meyer
david.meyer@fortune.com
@superglaze
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