Meta is funding a groundbreaking initiative to get some of the UK’s brightest minds in AI to apply their expertise to public services using open source models, including Meta’s Llama models.
The Open Source AI Fellowship is an opportunity to answer a question governments frequently wrestle with: how do you bring innovation and technical expertise from the private sector and elsewhere into government to solve problems, bring new thinking and challenge civil service orthodoxy?
The focus on open source AI is also crucial for the UK to establish its sovereign AI capacity and be, in the words of the Prime Minister, an “AI maker not an AI taker”. Open source AI gives the government the ability to develop its own AI tools without being dependent on closed systems from overseas companies.
Already, open source AI models are helping researchers and developers make major scientific and medical breakthroughs, and they have the potential to transform the delivery of public services too. With $1 million in funding from Meta, the Open Source AI Fellowship will see a number of AI experts, in a program run by the Alan Turing Institute (ATI), placed in departments across government to help solve big challenges openly and in the public interest.
The fellows could work on building AI tools for high-security use cases like language translation in a national security context, and making use of construction planning data to speed up the approvals process to get more homes built. They could also help expand “Humphrey”, a bundle of AI tools that help civil servants by taking away the admin burdens involved in summarizing documents, taking notes and summarizing consultation responses.
Importantly, anything built through the program using open source models is government-owned, so sensitive government data sets can remain within the government, models can be freely adapted to the government’s needs, and they are not tied into contracts or systems provided by closed AI model providers. The use cases developed will also be open sourced for wider public use.
Last week, Meta launched a report with British think tank the Social Market Foundation, which shows that if the government treats open source AI as a genuine option in its digital projects, it can create better value for taxpayers, greater strategic autonomy, stronger security auditing and more public legitimacy.
The fellowship program is an important step in that direction. Fellows will focus on using open source AI models, which the UK government believes could reduce costs to the taxpayer and help unlock up to £45 billion in productivity gains across the public sector. By building open source tools in areas like national security, public health and planning reform, the fellows will help ensure public money is invested in a way that produces results for the government much more immediately and directly.
The fellowships will begin in January 2026 and last for 12 months. Applications will open shortly.
We hope these fellows will make a big, positive difference and help to demonstrate just how valuable open source AI can be to governments and society more broadly.
