Meta wants US government to use its AI

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company is working on the adoption of Llama, its AI model, across the US government. The model is open source, and that might explain the interest.

“We're also working with the public sector to adopt Llama across the US government,” Zuckerberg said during his opening remarks for Meta’s Q3 earnings call this week, after bragging that the tech giant is “making a lot of progress” with its AI efforts.

His comment was very brief, and it’s not exactly clear how far advanced the supposed negotiations with the US government are. Will Meta be getting paid for this AI-powered relationship?

Thankfully, Meta’s spokesperson soon told The Verge that the company has partnered with the US State Department to “see how Llama could help address different challenges – from expanding access to safe water and reliable electricity to helping support small businesses.”

The Department of Education and other branches of government are allegedly also interested. Meta said no payment is involved in the partnerships.

The timing is interesting. Americans are voting in the presidential election, and Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, really hates Zuckerberg. In the summer, Trump threatened to jail the Meta CEO.

The possibility that Trump will win the election is very real, so perhaps Zuckerberg is attempting to seal these partnerships before it’s too late.

Of course, it’s nothing that Meta’s rivals in the AI scene aren’t also doing. For instance, OpenAI and Anthropic said in late August that they would share their models with the US AI Safety Institute for screening ahead of their release.

OpenAI also said last week in a blog post that its models were used by the US Agency for International Development, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

However, the US government might also like Meta’s models because they’re open source. In July, the US Commerce Department issued a report in support of “open-weight” generative AI models precisely like Meta’s Llama.

The report said open-weight models broaden the availability of generative AI to small companies, researchers, nonprofits ,and individual developers.

Linda Khan, head of the Federal Trade Commission, also said in July that open AI models – which allow developers to customize them with few restrictions – are more in line with fair competition.