US government agencies are set to gain access to Meta Platforms’ artificial intelligence system, Llama, as the Trump administration advances efforts to integrate commercial AI tools into federal operations.
The General Services Administration (GSA), the government’s purchasing arm, plans to add Llama to its approved list for federal agencies.
Josh Gruenbaum, the GSA’s procurement lead, stated that this approval ensures the free tool meets government security and legal standards, allowing agencies to experiment with it.
Llama is a large language model capable of processing data, including text, video, images and audio.
GSA has also signed off in recent months on AI tools from Meta’s competitors, including Amazon Web Services,Microsoft,Google, Anthropic and Open AI.
The companies agreed to sell their paid products at steep discounts and meet the government’s security requirements, GSA has said.
“It’s not about currying favor,” Gruenbaum said when asked whether tech executives are giving the government discounts to get President Donald Trump‘s approval.
“It’s about that recognition of how do we all lock in arms and make this country the best country it could possibly be.”
Federal agencies will be able to deploy the tool to speed up contract review or more quickly solve information technology hiccups, among other tasks, he said.
Meanwhile, Alphabet’s Google will seek to avoid a forced sale of part of its online advertising business in its latest face-off with U.S. antitrust enforcers at a trial starting on Monday in Alexandria, Virginia.
The trial is the government’s next best shot at curbing what a judge has ruled is Google’s monopoly power, after losing a separate bid to make Google sell its Chrome browser earlier this month. Online publishers and rival ad tech developers, some of whom have separately sued Google for damages, will be watching the case closely.
The U.S. Department of Justice and a coalition of states are seeking to make Google sell its ad exchange, AdX, where online publishers pay Google a 20% fee to sell ads in auctions that happen instantly when users load websites. The government also seeks to require Google to make the mechanism that decides the winner of those auctions open source.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who will preside over the trial, ruled in April that Google holds unlawful monopolies in web advertising technology. After this week’s trial, she will decide what remedies to impose on the company.