Facebook helped China develop advanced AI to ‘outcompete American companies’
Meta actively helped China in the race to develop artificial intelligence as part of its failed effort to cozy up to Beijing, a former executive-turned-whistleblower said during a bombshell Senate hearing on Wednesday.
Sarah Wynn-Williams, who detailed her experience at Meta in the scathing memoir “Careless People,” testified that she witnessed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and other executives lie to Congress and “repeatedly undermine US national security and betray American values.”
During her opening statement, Wynn-William, Facebook’s former director of global public policy, told lawmakers that Meta began providing briefings to the Chinese Communist Party “as early as 2015” while pursuing “Project Aldrin” – a top-secret effort to gain access to China’s lucrative market.
“These briefings focused on critical emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence – explicit goal being to help China outcompete American companies,” said Wynn-Williams, who worked at the social media giant from 2011 to 2017.
“There’s a straight line you can draw from these briefings to the recent revelations that China is developing AI models for military use, relying on Meta’s Llama model,” she added.
The hearing before the Senate Judiciary’s subcommittee on crime and counterterrorism occurred after Meta obtained an emergency order barring Wynn-Williams from promoting or publicly discussing her allegations against the company. Despite that effort, her book “Careless People” surged to the top of best-sellers lists.
Wynn-Williams said Meta’s AI model Llama “has contributed significantly to Chinese advances in AI technologies like DeepSeek” – which sparked a US tech selloff earlier this year after releasing a model on par with American rivals that it claims cost less than $6 million to train.
“The greatest trick Mark Zuckerberg ever pulled was wrapping the American flag around himself and calling himself a patriot and saying he didn’t offer services in China while he spent the last decade building an $18 billion business there,” Wynn-Williams said.
“And he continues to wrap the flag around himself as we move into the next era of artificial intelligence.”
Meta saw the tech briefings with top-level Chinese officials as part of the “value proposition” it could offer to get into Beijing’s good graces, according to Wynn-Williams.
The whistleblower also detailed her allegation that the company developed a “censorship system” in 2015 on behalf of the CCP that risked exposing the data of American users and agreed to block accounts in 2017 operated by Guo Wengui, a self-exiled Chinese billionaire and dissident, after facing pressure from China.
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nypost.com
Tom |
