Top Chinese research institutions linked to the People's Liberation Army have used Meta's publicly available Llama model to develop an AI tool for potential military applications, according to academic papers and analysts.

In a June paper reviewed by Reuters, six Chinese researchers from three institutions, including two under the People's Liberation Army's (PLA) leading research body, the Academy of Military Science (AMS), detailed how they had used an early version of Meta's Llama as a base for what it calls "ChatBIT."

The researchers used an earlier Llama 2 13B large language model (LLM) that Meta, incorporating their own parameters to construct a military-focused AI tool to gather and process intelligence, and offer accurate and reliable information for operational decision-making.