Meta announced on Monday that its Llama artificial intelligence (AI) models will be available to US government agencies and contractors. The announcement came just days after reports claimed that the company’s open-source AI models were being used by researchers in China for military use. The social media giant highlighted that it will also make its Llama models available to those entities in the US that are working on defence and national security applications as well as private sector partners supporting their work.
In a newsroom post, Meta confirmed that it has made Llama available directly to US government agencies as well as any allied entities working with the country’s government. The company is also partnering with private enterprises such as Accenture Federal Services, Amazon Web Services, Anduril, Booz Allen, Databricks, Deloitte, IBM, Leidos, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Oracle, Palantir, Scale AI and Snowflake to bring Llama to government agencies.
Highlighting how Meta’s AI models are helping the US government via private enterprises, the company listed several examples. It said that Oracle is building on Llama to synthesise aircraft maintenance documents. This is said to help the enterprise quickly and accurately diagnose problems, speed up repair time, and more.
Similarly, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are hosting Meta’s AI models on their cloud servers to build solutions for sensitive data, the company stated. IBM’s WatsonX is also said to be bringing Llama to national security agencies via their self-managed data centres.
Meta said that large language models (LLMs) can support many aspects of the US’ safety and national security due to their capability to process large volumes of data and generate insights. Citing more use cases, the social media giant said LLMs can also help streamline logistics and planning, track terrorist financing, and strengthen cyber defences.
“Open source systems have helped to accelerate defence research and high-end computing, identify security vulnerabilities and improve communication between disparate systems,” it added.
Notably, the announcement comes after Reuters reported that Chinese research institutions associated with the People’s Liberation Army were using the open-source Llama AI models to develop a tool that can potentially be used for military usage.