Former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams, who have made some serious allegations about the company in her memoir “Careless People,” testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, accusing Meta of aiding China’s artificial intelligence development and undermining U.S. national security to secure access to Chinese markets.
“The greatest trick Mark Zuckerberg ever pulled was wrapping the American flag around himself and calling himself a patriot and saying he didn’t offer services in China while he spent the last decade building an $18 billion business there,” she told lawmakers.
“We are engaged in a high-stakes AI arms race against China. And during my time at Meta, company executives lied about what they were doing with the Chinese Communist Party to employees, shareholders, Congress, and the American public,” Wynn-Williams said in her prepared testimony.
The former director of global public policy claimed Meta provided briefings to Chinese officials “as early as 2015” as part of “Project Aldrin,” a secret initiative to enter China’s market. According to Wynn-Williams, these briefings focused on emerging technologies including AI, with the “explicit goal being to help China outcompete American companies.”
Meta employees did things in secret to win China’s favor, says ex-Facebook employee
“Throughout those seven years, I saw Meta executives repeatedly undermine U.S. national security and betray American values. They did these things in secret to win favor with Beijing and build an $18 billion dollar business in China,” she stated.
Wynn-Williams specifically linked Meta’s open-source AI model to Chinese advances: “There’s a straight line you can draw from these briefings to the recent revelations that China is developing AI models for military use, relying on Meta’s Llama model.”
The hearing comes just days before Meta faces a major antitrust trial that could force the company to divest Instagram and WhatsApp.
Senator Richard Blumenthal called Meta’s efforts to silence the whistleblower “disgusting and the height of hypocrisy for a supposed free speech champion,” adding that “the American people are going to be pretty outraged that Mark Zuckerberg sold out America to China.”
Wynn-Williams also testified that Meta deleted the Facebook account of a prominent Chinese dissident living in the U.S., bowing to pressure from China.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone responded that Wynn-Williams’ “testimony is divorced from reality and riddled with false claims,” emphasizing that while Zuckerberg was public about interest in China, “we do not operate our services in China today.”
Wynn-Williams’ book “Careless People” reached Amazon’s top 10 bestseller list despite Meta’s legal attempts to block her from discussing her allegations.
