In Silicon Valley, open source is a religion. It’s the gospel of innovation, the belief that sharing code freely and letting the best ideas win will lift all boats. It’s a beautiful, democratic ideal. It’s also a dangerous strategic blind spot that is actively helping America’s primary global rival.

While US policymakers are tied in knots debating the theoretical risks of AI, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is systematically exploiting the West’s open-source ethos to modernize its military. The most glaring example? Meta’s Llama 2 model, which was released to the world with a permissive license and promptly weaponized by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

This isn’t a hypothetical risk. It already happened. This is the story of the open-source trap.

The Playbook: How the PLA Turned Llama into a Military Tool

The incident, detailed in a stunning November 2024 report from the Jamestown Foundation, reads like a spy novel. But it’s all public information, hiding in plain sight [1].

Here’s the playbook:

  1. Release: In 2023, Meta releases its powerful Llama 2 large language model. The weights are widely available, and the acceptable use policy is little more than a suggestion, with no real enforcement mechanism.
  2. Adapt: Researchers at PLA-linked institutions, including the Academy of Military Sciences, download the model. They begin fine-tuning it on their own military-specific datasets—classified documents, intelligence reports, and tactical dialogues.
  3. Specialize: Using techniques like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), they efficiently customize the model for military tasks without the massive expense of training a model from scratch. They create “ChatBIT,” a specialized AI tool for intelligence analysis, mission planning, and situational awareness.
  4. Deploy: ChatBIT is demonstrated to outperform other comparable models in military contexts. The PLA now has a powerful, Western-built AI tool, repurposed for its own strategic ends.

While this was happening, a senior PLA general was calling for the United Nations to restrict the use of AI in warfare, a classic misdirection [1].

Meta’s Response: A Masterclass in Closing the Barn Door After the Horse Has Bolted

When the news broke, Meta’s response was as predictable as it was impotent.

On November 1, 2024, a spokesperson stated that any use by the PLA was “unauthorized and contrary to our acceptable use policy” [2]. This statement is meaningless. The very nature of open-source models with widely available weights makes such policies unenforceable. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

What happened next was even more telling. Just days later, on November 4, Meta completely reversed its position. The company announced it would now allow US government agencies and defense contractors to use Llama for military purposes [3].

The logic is clear: if our adversary is going to use our technology against us, we might as well use it too. But this reactive posture misses the point. The damage is already done. China didn’t just get a free, state-of-the-art AI model; it got a massive R&D subsidy from a US tech giant, saving it years of effort and billions of dollars.

This Isn’t an Isolated Incident: It’s a Strategy

The Llama-to-ChatBIT pipeline is not a one-off. It’s a symptom of a much larger strategic shift. A December 2025 report from Stanford’s HAI highlights that Chinese open-weight models, like Alibaba’s Qwen and DeepSeek’s R1, are now surpassing American models in global downloads [4].

“After years of lagging behind, Chinese AI models — especially open-weight LLMs — seem to have caught up or even pulled ahead of their global counterparts in advanced AI model capabilities and adoption.” — Stanford HAI, December 2025 [4]

America’s lead in AI was built on a handful of cutting-edge, closed-source models from labs like OpenAI and Google. But China, partly out of necessity due to US chip export controls, has masterfully exploited the open-source ecosystem. They are building a broad, resilient, and globally adopted foundation of AI technology that is rapidly becoming the new standard.

The Open-Source Trap

This is the trap. The US promotes open-source AI to foster innovation, increase competition, and enhance transparency. These are all laudable goals within a peacetime, commercial context. A 2024 CSIS report even outlines how the Department of Defense could benefit from open models to avoid vendor lock-in and improve security through wider peer review [5].

But we are not in a peacetime commercial context. We are in a state of intense strategic competition. By releasing its most powerful tools into the wild, the US is handing its chief rival the very technology it needs to close the gap.

The debate in Washington is stuck on abstract, theoretical risks, while the CCP is focused on concrete, practical applications. While the US Commerce Department’s assessment of the risks remains “inconclusive,” the PLA is running drills with ChatBIT [5].

The open-source ideology, born in the collaborative spirit of early internet culture, has become a critical vulnerability. It presupposes a world of good-faith actors. That is not the world we live in. Until US tech leaders and policymakers recognize that we are in a strategic competition where every technological edge matters, America will continue to inadvertently arm its rivals.

References

[1] PRC Adapts Meta’s Llama for Military and Security AI Applications - Jamestown [2] Chinese researchers develop AI model for military use on back of Meta’s Llama - Reuters [3] Meta Permits Its A.I. Models to Be Used for U.S. Military Purposes - The New York Times [4] Beyond DeepSeek: China’s Diverse Open-Weight AI Ecosystem and Its Policy Implications - Stanford HAI [5] Defense Priorities in the Open-Source AI Debate - CSIS