Meta Platforms Inc. has granted approval for US government agencies and defense contractors to use its AI models, opening the door for Meta’s technology to play a key role in military and national security efforts.

Today, Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, in a blog post announced that Meta’s open source Llama models are increasingly being used by a broad community of researchers, entrepreneurs, developers and government bodies. “We are pleased to confirm that we are also making Llama available to U.S. government agencies, including those that are working on defense and national security applications, and private sector partners supporting their work. We’re partnering with companies including 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.

Oracle, for example, is building on Llama to synthesize aircraft maintenance documents so technicians can more quickly and accurately diagnose problems, speeding up repair time and getting critical aircraft back in service. Scale AI is fine-tuning Llama to support specific national security team missions, such as planning operations and identifying adversaries’ vulnerabilities. Lockheed Martin has incorporated Llama into its AI Factory, accelerating a variety of use cases such as code generation, data analysis and enhancing business processes.

Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are also using Llama to support governments by hosting our models on their secure cloud solutions for sensitive data. And IBM’s watsonx solution is bringing Llama to national security agencies in their self-managed data centers and clouds.

These kinds of responsible and ethical uses of open source AI models like Llama 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.

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.” For more on this read Meta’s full announcement here. You could also read the full BNN Bloomberg report on this here.