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 Mondaythe company said it is working with Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Oracle and others to make Llama available to the government.

Under Meta’s “Acceptable Use Policy”, people cannot use the latest Llama 3 model for “military, war, industrial or nuclear applications, espionage”. However, as Meta explained, 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 relying on Llama to “synthesize” maintenance documents to help aircraft technicians make repairs, while Lockheed Martin uses the model to generate code and analyze data. The company hinted that it would make its AI model available to the government during its third-quarter 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. A Meta spokesman said at the time Reuters that “the supposed role of a unique and outdated version of an American open-source model is irrelevant when we know that China is already investing more than a trillion dollars to overtake the US in AI.”

In his post, Meta described the importance of the US getting ahead in the AI ​​race, saying that “it is in the interests of America and the wider democratic world that American open source models excel and succeed against models from China and elsewhere “. Other AI companies are also getting involved in the military, with a report from interceptions revealing that US Africa Command has bought cloud computing services from Microsoft, providing access to OpenAI tools. Google DeepMind also has a cloud computing contract with the Israeli government.