All posts by Carly Ramsey

Choice: the path to AI sovereignty

Post Syndicated from Carly Ramsey original https://blog.cloudflare.com/sovereign-ai-and-choice/

Every government is laser-focused on the potential for national transformation by AI. Many view AI as an unparalleled opportunity to solve complex national challenges, drive economic growth, and improve the lives of their citizens. Others are concerned about the risks AI can bring to its society and economy. Some sit somewhere between these two perspectives. But as plans are drawn up by governments around the world to address the question of AI development and adoption, all are grappling with the critical question of sovereignty — how much of this technology, mostly centered in the United States and China, needs to be in their direct control? 

Each nation has their own response to that question — some seek ‘self-sufficiency’ and total authority. Others, particularly those that do not have the capacity to build the full AI technology stack, are approaching it layer-by-layer, seeking to build on the capacities their country does have and then forming strategic partnerships to fill the gaps. 

We believe AI sovereignty at its core is about choice. Each nation should have the ability to select the right tools for the task, to control its own data, and to deploy applications at will, all without being locked into a single provider or a single way of doing things. It’s about autonomy and options, realized through a diversified, resilient digital supply chain. 

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. We make tools for developers around the world to build Internet and AI applications that are widely, and in many cases, freely, available. We work on standards to improve interoperability and prevent vendor lock-in. And we are global — our network spans 330 cities in over 125 countries. By supporting local developers to build and deploy AI tools and services right where they are, Cloudflare can help each nation on their path to greater AI sovereignty. 

Creating a future that enables many AI options

Many nations recognize the practical challenge of realizing a robust AI-driven future that incorporates sovereignty — the significant cost and complexity of the infrastructure needed to set AI in action. Cloudflare believes that countries can achieve their objectives by creating vibrant marketplaces that allow multiple options, and we are creating a path for governments that provides maximum choice:

Infrastructure accessibility: Countries often focus on building large data centers that have the compute capacity to train general purpose AI models, neglecting the infrastructure needed to effectively deploy AI. Because of their proximity to end users, distributed edge networks are critical to ensuring that consumers can actually use AI technologies at scale. Although some AI technologies will be designed to work on-device, many will need more power to run AI inference, the tasks that users ask an AI engine to complete.  Distributed networks are equipped to run AI workloads at the edge, to help deliver the low latency and high performance needed for advanced technologies. Cloudflare’s distributed network gives developers a path to rapidly deploy their apps globally without massive upfront investments. 

Inclusivity: Nations want their entire economies, from the small businesses, to research institutions, to non-profits and enterprises, to benefit from AI transformation. Serverless models like Cloudflare’s make it easy to get started. Developers pay only for what they use, rather than being locked into paying for expensive and unnecessary compute, dramatically lowering the barrier to entry. Our free tier allows developers to experiment, build, and even launch applications without any cost, while our pay-as-you-go model for increased usage removes the significant financial barriers that might otherwise keep advanced AI out of reach. 

Control over data: An important part of sovereignty is the ability to control your own data. We believe countries should avoid equating this type of control with data locality, focusing instead on integrating security tools that provide visibility and the ability to restrict access to data.  Cloudflare’s global, distributed network ensures that developers can experiment, build, and deploy AI-powered applications right where they are, setting rules and controls at the Internet edge.

Multi-modal, dynamic markets: Building new applications with closed AI models can make it challenging to switch models later, and can make developers dependent on particular providers. AI strategies must embrace diversity — developers should have access to a wide variety of both open source and closed AI models. Cloudflare’s Workers AI platform, with over 50 open source models, is model agnostic, helping to create a competitive, dynamic environment where developers can swap models in and out as better, cheaper, or more specialized options become available. Cloudflare’s AI Gateway allows our customers to connect and control all their AI models, regardless of vendor, in a single, unified, interoperable platform. 

Underpinning all of this is the importance of open standards that encourage interoperability. Open standards and protocols throughout the AI technology stack help prevent dependency, create dynamic and competitive markets, and create choice for governments and their developers.

Championing regional AI innovation  

Many countries have started to put their own mark on how to spur innovation in their markets, starting with large language models (LLM).  AI development to date has mostly centered around LLMs  trained on English-centric data, and increasingly, Chinese-centric data, leaving behind those who can’t fully access this technology in these two languages. Recognizing this gap, these nations are building and freely offering AI models trained on local language datasets that are fine-tuned to the nuances of their own cultures and languages. This approach lowers the barrier to entry for local businesses, organizations, and governments to create customized AI solutions for their specific markets. Open-sourcing these LLMs is to recognize that AI sovereignty is a means to an end. The goal is innovation, economic growth, and the ability to solve meaningful problems.

Cloudflare is now supporting these sovereign AI initiatives in India, Japan, and Southeast Asia. We are bringing these locally-developed, open-source AI models to developers around the world through our serverless inference platform, Workers AI.

India: India’s national vision is “AI for All”, which focuses on AI driving inclusive growth and social empowerment. India will host the momentous global AI Impact Summit in 2026, and a key element of showcasing empowering technological advancements that are accessible to the Global South. With its immense linguistic diversity, India is at the forefront of creating models that serve its hundreds of millions of Internet users in their native tongues. A cornerstone in this endeavor is the Government of India’s Bhashini, a digital public good platform that enables all Indian citizens to access the Internet and digital services in 22 official languages.

Cloudflare is now offering AI4Bharat’s IndicTrans2 model, a key open source language model that is also part of the Bhashini initiative. The model is able to translate text across 22 Indic languages, including Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Tamil, Sanskrit and even traditionally low-resourced languages like Kashmiri, Manipuri and Sindhi. 

You can use the @cf/ai4bharat/indictrans2-en-indic-1B model on Workers AI as follows:

curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/ACCOUNT_ID/ai/run/@cf/ai4bharat/indictrans2-en-indic-1B \
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer TOKEN' \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{
    "text": ["What is your favourite food?", "I like pizza"],
    "target_language": "guj_Gujr"
}'

Japan: Japan has a very clear and expansive vision of AI development. Concerned about Japan’s slow AI uptake, the Japanese government aims to make the country “the world’s most friendly AI nation” by creating the ideal conditions for AI growth, both at home and abroad. A major initiative for Japan’s government is supporting AI that deeply understands the complexities and cultural context of the Japanese language. 

Cloudflare is offering Preferred Networks, Inc.(PFN)  PLaMo-Embedding-1B, a home-grown Japanese text embedding model, made freely and openly available. The Japanese government supported PFN through its Generative AI Accelerator Challenge (GENIAC) program, which supports local LLM development through subsidized access to compute resources for training. The PLaMo Embedding model enables users to generate high-quality embeddings for Japanese text, which is helpful for building RAG-powered applications and semantic search use cases.

You can use the @cf/pfnet/plamo-embedding-1b model on Workers AI as follows:

curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/ACCOUNT_ID/ai/run/@cf/pfnet/plamo-embedding-1b \
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer TOKEN' \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{
  	"text": [
            "PLaMo-Embedding-1Bは、Preferred Networks, Inc. によって開発された日本語テキスト埋め込みモデルです。",
            "最近は随分と暖かくなりましたね。"
        ]
}'

Southeast Asia: As Chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Working Group on AI Governance, Singapore’s ambitious National AI Strategy 2.0 aims to ensure that AI is a public good, both for Southeast Asia and the world. As a cornerstone of this strategy, Singapore is championing the development and adoption of SEA-LION, a family of open-source LLMs designed for Southeast Asia’s diverse languages and cultures. The initiative aims to establish the nation as an inclusive global AI leader, ensuring the technology is both accessible and regionally relevant to its multilingual and multicultural populaces. The models are adept in numerous regional languages, including Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malaysia, Thai, Vietnamese, and Tamil, unlocking AI technologies for a significant portion of the Asian and global population.

SEA-LION model v4-27B is now available on the Workers AI platform. SEA-LION v4 stands out on the Singapore government’s leaderboard as its most powerful, efficient, multimodal and multilingual model yet. 

You can use the @cf/aisingapore/gemma-sea-lion-v4-27b-it model on Workers AI as follows:

curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/ACCOUNT_ID/ai/run/@cf/aisingapore/gemma-sea-lion-v4-27b-it \
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer TOKEN' \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{
  "messages": [
    {
      "role": "user",
      "content": "แล้วทำผัดไทยอย่างไร"
    }
  ]
}'

Bringing AI models to the world

Singapore, India and Japan have all chosen to open-source many of their local language models, a strategy that champions an expansive vision of AI sovereignty. This approach demonstrates a crucial understanding: true AI sovereignty is ensuring you have choices. 

Supporting local language open source models is more than just supporting technology; this is a shared commitment to fostering an open, interoperable, and competitive AI ecosystem by empowering governments and developers to solve local problems, create economic opportunities, and preserve their digital and cultural heritages.

We are honored to support the initiatives of the governments of India, Japan, and Singapore on this journey. We believe that by putting their sovereign AI models into the hands of developers in their economies, we can help unlock a powerful wave of innovation that is more diverse, equitable, and representative of the world we live in. The future of AI is being built today, and we are proud to ensure that AI developers everywhere are at the forefront. 

Choice is the foundation of AI sovereignty. We’re starting with the models from India, Japan, and Singapore on our serverless inference platform, but it’s only the start. Come build with us! Take the first step for free on Workers AI.

Heeding the call to support Australia’s most at-risk entities

Post Syndicated from Carly Ramsey original https://blog.cloudflare.com/heeding-the-call-to-support-australias-most-at-risk-entities


When Australia unveiled its 2023-2030 Australian Cyber Security Strategy in November 2023, we enthusiastically announced Cloudflare’s support, especially for the call for the private sector to work together to protect Australia’s smaller, at-risk entities. Today, we are extremely pleased to announce that Cloudflare and the Critical Infrastructure – Information Sharing and Analysis Centre (CI-ISAC), a member-driven organization helping to defend Australia’s critical infrastructure from cyber attacks, are teaming up to protect some of Australia’s most at-risk organizations – General Practitioner (GP) clinics.

Cloudflare helps a broad range of organizations -– from multinational organizations, to entrepreneurs and small businesses, to nonprofits, humanitarian groups, and governments across the globe — to secure their employees, applications and networks. We support a multitude of organizations in Australia, including some of Australia’s largest banks and digital natives, with our world-leading security products and services.

When it comes to protecting entities at high risk of cyber attack who might not have significant resources, we at Cloudflare believe we have a lot to offer. Our mission is to help build a better Internet. A key part of that mission is democratizing cybersecurity – making a range of tools readily available for all, including small and medium enterprises (SMEs), non-profits, and individuals. We also offer our cyber protection products and services at no cost to certain at-risk organizations. One example of this is Australia’s Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef, which is a participant in Cloudflare’s Project Galileo. Through Project Galileo, they have access to our advanced cybersecurity tools and support, freeing them to focus on their mission.

CI-ISAC Australia is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help build the collective defenses of Australia’s critical infrastructure to protect them from crippling cyberattacks. CI-ISAC facilitates sharing, aggregates sources, and analyzes cyber threat intelligence across multiple sectors, including healthcare.

Project Secure Health – protecting Australia’s General Practitioner (GP) clinics

Globally, the healthcare sector consistently reports the highest financial costs from cyber attacks. Sensitive patient data is a prime target for cybercriminals. Not surprisingly, Australia’s big and small healthcare organizations alike are facing crippling cyberattacks. GP clinics serve as the backbone of Australia’s community healthcare, but these small-but-essential entities typically face resource constraints that make it difficult for them to implement fundamental but costly cybersecurity measures, leaving Australian patient data exposed to cybercriminals.

The 2023-2030 Australia Cybersecurity Strategy is clear about the threat to smaller at-risk organizations and the vital role of the private sector in supporting these entities. We couldn’t agree more. Heeding their call to help make Australia more secure for all, we are extremely pleased to introduce Project Secure Health: Cloudflare and CI-ISAC’s combined cyber security support for Australia’s GP clinics. This program will enable Australia’s GP Clinics to counter a range of challenging cyber threats: data breaches, ransomware attacks, phishing scams, and insider threats.

CI-ISAC will provide GP clinics with membership in its organization for free and with no time limit, which will enable member GP clinics to proactively understand and respond to healthcare-specific cyber threats. Clinics will have access to CI-ISAC’s tailored threat intelligence products and services, informed by observations across Australia’s critical infrastructure sectors.

As members of CI-ISAC, GP clinics will also receive key Cloudflare services, for free and with no time limit: Cloudflare Gateway, and Cloudflare Access, our Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) service. Cloudflare Gateway helps protect GP clinics against Internet threats by preventing staff from accessing harmful and inappropriate Internet content, like ransomware or phishing sites. With Cloudflare Access, GP clinics can simply and effectively manage user access to sensitive patient data, thereby minimizing the risk of unauthorized users gaining access.

Cloudflare and CI-ISAC are ready to support

For GP Clinics interested in participating in Project Secure Health, please contact CI-ISAC at [email protected]. To be eligible for free CI-ISAC membership and Cloudflare ZTNA services, GP Clinics must have fewer than 50 staff members.

Project Safekeeping – protecting the world’s most vulnerable infrastructure with Zero Trust

Post Syndicated from Carly Ramsey original https://blog.cloudflare.com/project-safekeeping/

Project Safekeeping – protecting the world’s most vulnerable infrastructure with Zero Trust

Project Safekeeping – protecting the world’s most vulnerable infrastructure with Zero Trust

Under-resourced organizations that are vital to the basic functioning of our global communities face relentless cyber attacks, threatening basic needs for health, safety and security.

Cloudflare’s mission is to help make a better Internet. Starting December 13, 2022, we will help support these vulnerable infrastructure by providing our enterprise-level Zero Trust cybersecurity solution to them at no cost, with no time limit.

It is our pleasure to introduce our newest Impact initiative: Project Safekeeping.

Small targets, devastating impacts

Critical infrastructure is an obvious target for cyber attack: by its very definition, these are the organizations and systems that are crucial for the functioning of our society and economy. As such, these organizations cannot have prolonged interruptions in service, or risk having sensitive data exposed.

Our conversations over the past few months with government officials in Australia, Germany, Japan, Portugal, and the United Kingdom show that they are focused on the threat to critical infrastructure, but resource constraints mean that their attention is on protecting large organizations – immense financial institutions, hospital networks, oil pipelines, and airports. Yet, the small critical infrastructure organizations that are the foundation of our communities are also at risk: the neighborhood hospital, water treatment facility, and local energy provider that fulfill our fundamental needs. We tend to ignore the small-yet-vitally-important companies that form the supply chains of our nationwide critical systems.

Unlike large organizations, smaller organizations typically do not have the capacity to manage relentless cyber attacks – usually operating on shoestring budgets, they do not have security personnel, threat insight teams, or the latest technology to keep their organizations secure. The numerous real life examples of cyber attacks against these small but vital organizations best illustrate the devastating impacts: in Japan, ransomware shut down a hospital’s access to patient records for nearly two months, halting the hospital’s ability to accept any new patients, including emergency patients; and in Germany, ransomware compromised a local county’s IT systems and no local public services could be provided to citizens for weeks, while the county is still struggling with the aftermath of the attack one year on.

Project Safekeeping: protecting global vulnerable critical infrastructure with Zero Trust

We at Cloudflare believe in helping to build a better Internet, for everyone. And we think that the welfare of our local communities should not be at risk because of the budget and operational constraints of these small and vulnerable entities. We think that we are particularly well-suited to help: Cloudflare is a global cybersecurity provider that blocked an average of 126 billion cyber threats each day in Q3 2022. And with Project Galileo and the Athenian Project, we have rich experience supporting organizations that are particularly vulnerable to cyber threats and lack the resources to protect themselves.

We want our support to be meaningful in order to allow these entities to focus on what they do best – meeting our communities’ basic needs. As expressed in this blog, Cloudflare provides an innovative and elegant solution to cybersecurity: Zero Trust. Zero Trust is a radical change in the approach to cybersecurity that is both effective and effortless, something that a resource-strapped organization will certainly appreciate.

Earlier this year, in response to the increasing cyber attacks on critical infrastructure stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we provided our Zero Trust solution to critical infrastructure in the United States via the Critical Infrastructure Defense Project. Now, we are expanding our support to the global community, initially focusing our efforts in Australia, Japan, Germany, Portugal and the United Kingdom.

Project Safekeeping – protecting the world’s most vulnerable infrastructure with Zero Trust

What Zero Trust services are available?

Depending on their specific needs, eligible entities in these regions will have our enterprise-level Zero Trust cybersecurity services for free and with no time limit – there is no catch and no underlying obligations. Eligible organizations will benefit from the full range of our Zero Trust services:

  • Connecting users to applications: Real-time verification of every user to every protected application in order to protect internal resources and defend against potential data breaches.
  • Filtering traffic: A Secure Web Gateway (SWG) prevents cyber threats and data breaches by filtering unwanted content from web traffic, blocking unauthorized user behavior, and enforcing company security policies.
  • Securing cloud applications: A Cloud Access Security Broker, or CASB, performs several security functions for cloud-hosted services (e.g. SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS applications). Standard CASBs secure confidential data through access control and data loss prevention, reveal shadow IT, and ensure compliance with data privacy regulations.
  • Protecting sensitive data: Data Loss Prevention (DLP) secures your orgnizations’ most sensitive data in transit.
  • Email security: Area 1 preemptively blocks phishing, Business Email Compromise attacks, malware-less fraud, and other incessant attacks coming through email.
  • Safer web browsing: Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) insulates users from untrusted web content and protects data in browser interactions from untrusted users and devices.

In addition to Zero Trust services above, eligible entities will have our world-class application security products – DDOS protection and Web Application Firewall (WAF).

Who can apply?

To be eligible, Project Safekeeping participants must be:

  • Located in Australia, Japan, Germany, Portugal, and the United Kingdom.
  • Considered critical infrastructure by governments in their respective localities.
  • Approximately up to 50 people and/or less than USD $10million in annual revenue/ balance sheet total.

If you think your organization may be eligible, we welcome you to contact us to learn more and apply, please visit: https://www.cloudflare.com/lp/project-safekeeping/.

Project Safekeeping – protecting the world’s most vulnerable infrastructure with Zero Trust