GSA approves Llama for federal use, allies gain defense access

Meta Platforms said on Tuesday it has extended government access to its open source Llama artificial intelligence models, following U.S. approval that allows the models to be used across federal agencies. The U.S. General Services Administration added Llama to its list of approved AI tools, and Meta announced that France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, NATO and European Union institutions will now be able to use the models for defence and national security tasks.

The GSA decision, part of its OneGov procurement initiative, makes Llama available to federal departments free of charge, officials said, and is intended to accelerate AI adoption across the government while keeping sensitive data under agency control. Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the GSA Federal Acquisition Service, said the agency focused its work on ensuring Llama meets federal security and privacy requirements and that the OneGov approach reduces duplicated purchasing and simplifies access for agencies.

Meta described Llama as a large language model capable of processing text, images, audio and video that can be fine tuned with governments own data, hosted in secure environments at varying classification...