Meta to limit access to AI systems it considers too risky

By Ralph Tathagata

Meta said it will limit internal access to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), commonly known as AI, systems that it considers high-risk. The tech behemoth noted that it will implement unspecified security protections to prevent the system from being exfiltrated and stop development until it can be made less dangerous.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO, had earlier pledged to make AGI available one day. However, in a new policy document, the company suggests that there are certain scenarios in which it may not release a highly capable AI system it developed internally.

The document, which Meta is calling its Frontier AI Framework, identifies two types of AI systems the company considers too risky to release: “high risk” and “critical risk” systems.

“Both high-risk and “critical-risk systems are capable of aiding in cybersecurity, chemical, and biological attacks, the difference being that critical-risk systems could result in a catastrophic outcome that cannot be mitigated in a proposed deployment context,” the document stated.

“High-risk systems, by contrast, might make an attack easier to carry out but not as reliably or dependably as a critical risk system. For example, the automated end-to-end compromise of a best-practice-protected corporate-scale environment and the proliferation of high-impact biological weapons,” the document added.

According to the document, Meta classifies system risk not based on any one empirical test but informed by the input of internal and external researchers who are subject to review by senior-level decision-makers. The company noted that it doesn’t believe the science of evaluation is sufficiently robust as to provide definitive quantitative metrics for deciding a system’s riskiness.

Meta’s family of AI models, called Llama, has racked up hundreds of millions of downloads. But Llama has also reportedly been used by at least one U.S. adversary to develop a defense chatbot.

In publishing its Frontier AI Framework, Meta may also be aiming to contrast its open AI strategy with Chinese AI firm DeepSeek’s. DeepSeek also makes its systems openly available. But the company’s AI has few safeguards and can be easily steered to generate toxic and harmful output.

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