Mark Zuckerberg and Meta would like you to know that they love America. Meta announced today that it will make its Llama models available to US government agencies and contractors working on national security issues.

“We are pleased to confirm that we are making Llama available to US government agencies, including those working on defense and homeland security applications, and the private sector partners who support their work,” said Nick Clegg, Meta’s President of Global Affairs. in a blog post.

Meta’s Llama models are open source, meaning that anyone who gets their hands on them can essentially do whatever they want. But today’s announcement marks a change from Meta’s acceptable use policy for models that had a provision against “military, war, industrial or nuclear applications, espionage”.

According to the blog post, Meta is modeling with companies that include “Accenture Federal Services, Amazon Web Services, Anduril, Booz Allen, Databricks, Deloitte, IBM, Leidos, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Oracle, Palantir, Scale AI and Snowflake to bring Lama to government agencies.”

Meta said Oracle was using Llama to synthesize aircraft maintenance documents to help with maintenance. He also said that weapons manufacturers will use Llama for a bunch of different things, including “code generation, data analysis and business process improvement.”

Why this sudden pivot to US defense contractors? It could have something to do with a Reuters report last week which discovered that various researchers connected to the Chinese military were using Meta’s Llama 2 AI model.

There is absolutely no evidence or even any indication that Meta had any direct hand in the People’s Liberation Army’s use of the Llama 2. But critics pointed out that Zuckerberg is strangely close to China. The CEO of Meta met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2017. Three years before that, he told a Chinese newspaper that he bought copies of Xi’s book, Governing China, for his employees. Why? “I want them to understand socialism with Chinese characteristics,” he said at the time.

But Zuckerberg is going through a rebrand that’s all-in on Americana. He’s grown his hair, dresses like a normal human being and talks about the US every chance he gets. On July 4 of this year, he he posted a video of himself on a boogie board in a tuxedo waving an American flag and drinking twisted tea.

Clegg’s ad is full of invocations of the American spirit. “As an American company, and one that owes its success in large part to the entrepreneurial spirit and democratic values ​​that the United States upholds, Meta wants to play its part to support the safety, security and economic prosperity of America and those closest to it. and allies,” the post said.

“For decades, open source systems have been essential to helping the United States build the world’s most advanced military and, in partnership with its allies, develop global standards for new technologies,” he continued. “Open source systems have helped accelerate defense and high-end computing research, identify security vulnerabilities, and improve communication between disparate systems.”

In the end, of course, he mentioned the competition. “We believe it is in the interests of America and the broader democratic world that American open source models excel and succeed over models in China and elsewhere,” he said.