The Chinese Military Is Weaponizing Facebook's Open Source AI

The company seems to be ok with it.

Yoinked

Here's an unintended consequence for you: Reuters reports that Facebook owner Meta's open source Llama model is already being used by the Chinese military.

According to the report, the military-focused AI tool dubbed "ChatBIT" is being developed to gather intelligence and provide information for operational decision-making, as laid out in an academic paper obtained by Reuters.

Unsurprisingly, allowing a foreign adversary's military to make use of your large language model isn't exactly a good look.

In a thinly-veiled attempt to own the narrative, Meta's president of global affairs Nick Clegg published a blog post just three days after Reuters' report, arguing that it's working to make Llama "available to US government agencies and contractors working on national security applications."

The blog post desperately attempts to tug at the heartstrings of American tech leaders, with Clegg arguing that AI models like Llama will "not only support the prosperity and security of the United States, they will also help establish US open source standards in the global race for AI leadership."

But its timing is certainly suspicious, as Gizmodo notes. What else could explain the saccharine chest-thumping appeal to Americans now, while China's People's Liberation Army was making use of its AI before the US government even considered doing the same?

Please and Thank You

As Reuters points out, Meta's blog post also flies in the face of the company's acceptable use policy, which forbids "military, warfare, nuclear industries or applications, espionage."

But since the AI is completely open source, these provisions are utterly ineffective and unenforceable, serving largely as a way for Meta to cover its tracks.

Clegg argued that by open-sourcing AI models, the US could better compete with other nations "including China," which are "racing to develop their own open source models" and "investing heavily to leap ahead of the US."

"We believe it is 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," the former deputy prime minister for the UK wrote.

But whether that kind of reasoning will satisfy officials at the Pentagon remains to be seen. Meta's flailing is symptomatic of a massive national security blindspot. Now that the cat is out of the bag, the United States' adversaries are enjoying the exact same leaps in tech as it and its allies.

Last month, the Biden administration announced that it was finalizing rules to limit US investment in AI in China that could threaten US national security. But given Meta's fast-and-loose approach, these rules will likely be far too little, far too late.

Meta, on the other hand, thinks its AI is far too puny to make any difference for China anyway.

"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 a trillion dollars to surpass the US on AI," a spokesperson told Reuters.

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