Meta Acquires AI Security Startup Virtue AI Co-Founder and Core Team

According to Dynamic Beating monitoring, Meta has recruited the three co-founders of the AI security and governance startup Virtue AI, along with the core team.

The three founders are Professor Dawn Song from the University of California, Berkeley, Associate Professor Bo Li from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Assistant Professor Sanmi Koyejo from Stanford University's Computer Science Department. Meta has only onboarded the team and has not acquired Virtue AI as a company entity, nor has it involved any intellectual property or customer contracts. Dawn Song was previously the founder of the privacy computing network Oasis Labs, with backing from top investors such as a16z Crypto, Accel, Polychain, and Pantera.

Virtue AI was established in 2024, focusing on enterprise-grade AI security infrastructure, developing automated red team testing, runtime fences, and intelligent agent security governance tools. Meta plans to enhance the capabilities of its autonomous software agents in guarding against security vulnerabilities such as data leaks and malicious instructions by introducing the team.

Song Xiao Dong will serve as the Vice President of Meta AI Research. She and Bo Li will join Meta's Superintelligence Labs (MSL) and report directly to the head, Nat Friedman, to align security research with cutting-edge model development. Sanmi Koyejo will join Meta FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) Lab and report to the lab head, Rob Fergus.

Prior to this, Virtue AI received early support from investors and institutions such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Walden Catalyst Ventures, Prosperity7 Ventures, Factory, Osage University Partners (OUP), and Liwu Chen.