At Wednesday's Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) questioned Facebook whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams, former Director of Global Public Policy.
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NewsTranscript
00:00So your chart, I take very seriously adversaries having access to critical
00:09technology such as artificial intelligence and I noted in my opening
00:14statement you made allegations about Meta's efforts to help China's government
00:19in that field. In your opening statement you said that Meta's goal was to help
00:25China out-compete American companies. Can you explain why they would want to do
00:31this and is there any documentation on that point? Thank You Senator. They saw I
00:39guess part of the value proposition that they could provide the Chinese Communist
00:43Party was their expertise in in helping Chinese officials. So they explicitly and
00:52I would be happy to provide you with the documentation called out it's you know
00:56US firms they said you know we can help so we can help you China not have to rely
01:03on firms like Cisco or IBM because we can help you with the the technical expertise
01:09so they were offering on you know things like how to build more efficient data
01:15centers or and how how to ensure that engineers could could better understand
01:24technology like photo tagging. Okay and then and by the way that documentation
01:31would be appreciated what was Meta's ultimate goal when they briefed Chinese
01:36government on artificial intelligence technology and what information and
01:41technology did they provide? So I think it links to this value proposition Meta has
01:48some of the best minds of a generation they've employed the smartest graduates
01:56working on cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence so who better
02:01if you're the Chinese Communist Party to teach you about these
02:05technologies than Meta and in terms of understanding the extent of this I think
02:13this is a really great area for your investigation. Now that Facebook has
02:19changed its name to Meta is Meta currently providing the Chinese government with
02:26access to artificial intelligence technology? So it's been well reported that
02:34Chinese researchers have used the llama model both for AI weapons and also that
02:44llama is part of what powers deep-sea. Please describe for the committee how Meta
02:53planned to share data from American citizens or the Chinese government and for
02:58example did Meta have any agreements with the Communist Chinese government to
03:03provide them with the data and if so do they still have those agreements as far as you can
03:09tell that you've been gone from the company? And so part part of the challenge as I
03:16mentioned was was building like the internet infrastructure to support their China
03:22ambitions and it was through that internet infrastructure that they would gain
03:26access to potentially American citizens data. I think again this is another very good
03:32area to investigate and get further information directly from the company. Who at Meta
03:38facilitated these conversations and what officials in the Chinese government did Meta staff meet with?
03:45So there were many meetings between the Chinese Communist Party and Meta so right from the top you know Mark
03:54Mark Zuckerberg met with Lu Wei and the most there were lots of visits back and
04:02forth between Beijing and Menlo Park and there were lots of visit and lots of
04:08meetings with senior Politburo senior CCP members and I'd be happy to provide more
04:14documentation on this to the committee. Okay then my last question follows on where
04:21Chairman Hawley left off if there's anything that you can add to this you
04:28don't have to repeat what you told him but describe to the committee how Meta plan to
04:34share data from American citizens with the Chinese government and for I don't think
04:44I'm going to ask that question I think you covered it well. Thank you Senator. Thank you very
04:48much. Thank you Mr. Chairman. Thank you Chairman Grassley. Thank you for being here. Thank you for
04:52these questions. Ms. Williams can I just go back to something you said a moment ago in response to
04:59to Senator Grassley and maybe let's just start at the beginning. So is it is it your testimony that
05:04Facebook executives employees cultivated relationships with members of the Chinese Communist Party?
05:11Absolutely Senator. And this happened over a period of years? This happened over many years. And did
05:18members of the Facebook executive team or other employees at Facebook Meta ever brief members of
05:25the Chinese Communist Party? Yes Senator regularly. Exchanged information with them? Yes Senator. What are
05:31some of the topics that they covered in these briefings? I mean it's incredibly broad so you had
05:36meetings at the top executive level so Mark and Cheryl and you had meetings you know all the way down to
05:42you know regular engineers who would be providing briefings on cutting-edge technology like facial
05:50recognition which is obviously very helpful to the Chinese Communist Party and you know Facebook Live
05:56as I mentioned photo tagging and internet infrastructure sorry like so how to build effective data centers you know Facebook has a pro a project called the Open Compute Project and which has five Chinese companies as a member of it and so it was at every at every level on every aspect of the many different technologies that Facebook has.
06:23You testified a moment ago that one of the things that faced part of their value proposition to China was that they would help them
06:30Facebook that is would help China out compete other American businesses. Can you just say more about that? I mean that seems like an extraordinary thing to me. Here you have an American company going to our chief foreign adversary on whom we currently have tariffs of like 10 billion percent and saying hey we'd love to help you.
06:50We would love to help you beat all of these other American companies. That's extraordinary. I mean what can you tell us about that?
06:57I mean I'd be happy to provide the documentation. I mean literally the documents in which they were writing this were called our value proposition to be put before the CCP.
07:07So was information related to artificial intelligence part of these briefings? I know you said that there were some sort of informal discussions but did Facebook actually brief members of the CCP on artificial intelligence to your knowledge?
07:21Yes Senator.
07:22And again was that a once off or was this a regular thing?
07:26Senator, I think this is a great area of investigation for your committee.
07:29So why would, you were at Facebook a long time, why would Facebook want to help China with artificial intelligence? I mean what's the strategy there do you think? What do you define the intent to have been?
07:45I think there are a lot. So I think we've talked about the general focus of the company of wanting to help China. You know, this is over a period of time where China was rapidly trying to increase its own technological expertise and trying to grow, had to grow its own homegrown technology company.
08:05So it's incredibly valuable to have the brightest minds in the world show you how that technology works. And then I think there's a, at the moment as you're aware, there is a debate in the AI community around whether open source models or closed models are more appropriate.
08:24And one of the considerations around that is national security. But it's not clear at this moment whether open source models or closed models will ultimately prevail. And there's a lot of money on the line.
08:36In some ways you could say it's helpful if you want open source to prevail to have a strong threat from a Chinese model so that you can say it's really important that America wins this.
08:53And we are the American open source option. And I think you can see the way that strategically plays out.
09:02So what you're saying is Facebook's AI model, Llama, I think it's called, that's an open source model. Is that right?
09:09Correct.
09:10And I think they just released Llama 4 or something just recently the last few days. So that's an open source model.
09:16Many of the other American competitors, San Altman's company for instance, for example, OpenAI is a closed sourced model, closed source code.
09:25So Facebook has a fundamentally different take, an open source model. They're briefing the Chinese government, including CCP officials, on this model, on their information.
09:36And then we get the revelation of DeepSeq just a few months ago, China's sort of breakthrough on AI.
09:43Do you think that Llama had something to do with DeepSeq? Do you think that that information sharing helped lead to DeepSeq?
09:50I think it's been widely reported that the DeepSeq model is in part based on Llama.
09:55And so, just playing this out, if China's DeepSeq model, another open source model I think, right, becomes the chief competitor to these other models in the United States,
10:08what you're saying is that it stands to reason, and this is something for us to look into certainly,
10:12but it stands to reason that in a way Facebook would benefit from that because you've got this thread in DeepSeq.
10:17Facebook is the only other really major American open source model out there.
10:22The others aren't built on that platform. So, you know, Facebook's, their profile is raised, the significance of their model is raised,
10:29and maybe they become more important than ever. I mean, does that stand to reason?
10:34I think it's a winner-takes-all situation, and I think that that would set up Meta in a very strong position.
10:42And as usual with Mark Zuckerberg and Meta, they intend to win and take all.
10:49Senator Blumenthal, if you're ready, I'll turn it over to you.
10:51Thanks very much, Mr. Chairman.