Meta AI is ready for war

Meta will now allow US government agencies and contractors to use its open-source Llama AI model for "national security applications." In an announcement on Monday, the company said it's working with Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Oracle, and others to make Llama available to the government.

Under Meta's "acceptable use policy," people can't use the latest Llama 3 model for "military, warfare, nuclear industries or applications, espionage." However, as explained by Meta, 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 building on Llama to "synthesize" maintenance documents to help aircraft technicians make repairs, while Lockheed Martin is using the model to generate code and analyze data. The company hinted at making its AI model available to the government during its quarter three earnings call.

Last week, a report from 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 At the time, a Meta spokesperson told Reuters that "the alleged role of a single, and outdated, version of an American open-source model is irrelevant when we know China is already investing more than a trillion dollars to surpass the US on AI."

In its post, Meta described the importance for the US to get ahead in the AI race, saying it's in "both America and the wider democratic world's interest for American open source models to excel and succeed over models from China and elsewhere." Other AI companies are getting involved with the military as well, with a report from The Intercept revealing that the US Africa Command bought cloud computing services from Microsoft, offering access to OpenAI's tools. Google DeepMind also has a cloud computing contract with the Israeli government.