Meta spent much of 2025 fighting off the narrative that it had fallen behind in AI, after a rocky Llama 4 launch and a costly reshuffle of its research division.
Now, with the damage sufficiently repaired, its chief executive has returned to the spotlight, presenting a philosophical case for the construction and sharing of AI.
The problem is that his argument about openness and trust comes across very differently when you consider what Meta actually did last year.
Mark Zuckerberg has published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing that superintelligence should not be locked inside a handful of labs. It should be distributed, so ordinary people, small businesses, and entire economies can use the tools currently reserved for the well-funded few.
He frames this as the defining question of the era, not whether superintelligent systems will exist, but who gets to touch them once they do.
It is a fair argument, but it also comes from someone whose company’s strategy depends on people believing it. That does not mean he is wrong. It simply means his claims deserve closer scrutiny than the op-ed gives them.
What Zuckerberg Got Right
Whatever you think of Zuckerberg, his point about concentration deserves attention. The idea of a few companies controlling the most capable AI models is a real risk, not just a theoretical one.
History supports his argument. Aviation, electricity, and personal computing all became truly transformative only after they moved beyond the institutions that created them and became accessible to ordinary people and small developers.
Meta’s decision to release Llama as an open-weight model, despite its technical limitations, has lowered the barrier to entry for developers in countries like Kenya.
Many of them could never afford access to a closed frontier model through an API, let alone the computing power needed to train one from scratch.
He also makes a fair point that many of the loudest warnings about AI replacing jobs come from the same companies building the technology that could make it happen. That contradiction is worth highlighting, even if Meta has its own reasons for drawing attention to it.
Where the Argument Breaks
The problem is that Zuckerberg’s stated philosophy does not match Meta’s actual AI track record in 2025, which was weaker than much of the coverage suggested. When Llama 4 launched in April 2025, it was not the leading multimodal model that Meta presented it as.
Independent testers were unable to reproduce Meta’s benchmark results. Researchers also found that the model submitted to a public leaderboard was an unreleased experimental chat version rather than the one available to users.
Many in the AI research community viewed this as an attempt to improve the model’s standing on the leaderboard.
In January 2026, Meta’s outgoing chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, told the Financial Times that the results had been “fudged a little bit.”
The controversy led to a company-wide AI reorganization, Meta’s investment of more than $14 billion in Scale AI, and a gradual shift away from fully open-weight models toward a more closed approach under Meta Superintelligence Labs.
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That history matters because the Wall Street Journal article relies heavily on trust. The idea of distributed superintelligence only works as a safety argument if the company promoting it is honest about what it has built.
A company that overstated its own benchmark results just months before publishing an essay about transparency is not automatically disqualified from making that argument. However, it is also not the impartial voice it presents itself to be.
The article also contains another contradiction. Zuckerberg built Meta by concentrating attention, user data, and advertising revenue more aggressively than almost any other company.
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are among the most centralized digital platforms ever created, and Meta has spent the past two decades defending that model in courts and before lawmakers.
Now Meta argues that concentration is one of the biggest risks of the AI era. Coming from a company that built its success on concentrating so much power, that argument deserves scrutiny.
It is less about outright hypocrisy and more about a company that benefited from one kind of gatekeeping while warning against another that it does not control.
Is He a Moral Arbiter, or Just Disguised Marketing?
Zuckerberg is not presenting himself as a regulator or a neutral AI safety researcher like some teams at Anthropic and OpenAI. Instead, he is positioning Meta as the open alternative to a future where AI is controlled by a few companies.
While this is framed as benefiting the public, it also supports Meta’s business interests.
That approach fits Meta’s position. The company cannot match the spending power of OpenAI and Google in the race to build closed AI models the way it once outspent competitors in social media.
By making openness its defining advantage, Meta is competing on terms that better suit its strengths.
Can Meta Still Move the Needle on AI?
This is where Zuckerberg’s record is stronger than many critics acknowledge and where the comparison to the Metaverse works in his favor.
Reality Labs lost tens of billions of dollars, and Horizon Worlds never gained widespread adoption. However, the data centers, custom chips, and talent Meta built during that period became the foundation for its rapid shift into AI.
Few executives could absorb losses on that scale and reuse those investments for a second major push so quickly. Meta’s projected capital spending of up to $135 billion in 2026 shows the company is still willing to invest at a level that few competitors can match.
Whether that spending leads to the best AI model is a different question. What it has clearly bought is influence, even without a technical lead.
READ: After the Metaverse, Meta Is Now Going Deep Into AI With Muse Spark
Llama’s setbacks and Meta’s move toward more closed, internal models suggest its position as an open-source champion is becoming harder to support.
Zuckerberg has the financial resources and global reach to keep influencing the direction of the AI conversation. What he still needs to prove is that Meta can build a model that earns that influence through its performance, not simply through the amount of money the company spends.
When it comes to trusting Zuckerberg’s judgment on AI, he has earned a place in the conversation, but he has not yet earned the role of referee.
