Everything we announced at our first-ever LlamaCon

• We’re celebrating the first-ever LlamaCon by sharing some exciting new tools that will make it even easier to build with Llama and create custom models to fit your use cases.
• The Llama API, launching as a limited preview, combines the best features of closed models with open-source flexibility, offering easy one-click API key creation and interactive playgrounds to explore different Llama models.
• We’re also sharing new Llama Protection Tools and announcing the Llama Defenders Program, where select trusted partners can access AI-enabled tools to help them evaluate the security of their systems to safeguard against potential threats.
• We’re announcing the 10 international recipients of the second Llama Impact Grants. With over $1.5 million USD awarded, these grants support companies, startups, and universities using Llama to drive transformative change.

LlamaCon has officially kicked off. Our inaugural event brings together developers from around the world who all have one thing in common: They love building with Llama. It’s been a little more than two years since we launched Llama. During that time, we’ve surpassed one billion downloads and, most importantly, established Llama as a leader in the open source AI ecosystem. Developers, startups, governments, and enterprises are finding success with Llama by leveraging its capabilities to drive innovation, improve efficiency, and solve complex problems.

Of course, we couldn’t bring together a group of developers without also sharing some open source tools that will make it easier for them to explore Llama models, build faster, and use the latest tools to defend and protect. Here’s a look at what we’re announcing today and how you can get started with our newest releases.

We want to make it even easier for you to quickly start building with Llama, while also giving you complete control over your models and weights without being locked into an API. Today, we’re announcing Llama API—our upcoming developer platform for Llama application development, which is available as a limited free preview.

Llama API provides easy one-click API key creation and interactive playgrounds to explore different Llama models, including the Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick models we announced earlier this month. When you’re ready to build your application, we provide a lightweight SDK in both Python and Typescript. Llama API is also compatible with the OpenAI SDK, making it easy to convert existing applications.

We know that it’s also important to have access to tools that help you customize and run your models more efficiently. As part of this release, we’re sharing tools for fine-tuning and evaluation in our new API, where you can tune your own custom versions of our new Llama 3.3 8B model. We’re sharing this capability to help you reduce costs while also working toward increased speed and accuracy. You can generate data, train on it, and then use our evaluations suite to easily test the quality of your new model. Making evaluations more accessible and easier to run will help move from gut feelings to data, ensuring you have models that perform well to meet your needs. The security and privacy of your content and data is our top priority. We do not use your prompts or model responses to train our AI models. When you’re ready, the models you build on the Llama API are yours to take with you wherever you want to host them, and we don’t keep them locked on our servers. We’re introducing these features to select customers, with plans for a broader rollout in the coming weeks and months. This will open up new possibilities for developers to build custom models for every kind of use case.

This preview is just step one for the Llama API. We’re excited to have more people building with our API and will use their feedback to help us iterate on future versions. If you’re interested in applying for one of the early limited spots for our free preview, please fill out this form.