The AI wars roll on — this time with Anthropic stepping right in behind OpenAI by offering its Claude chatbot to the federal government for the bargain price of just $1 a year.
The San Francisco–based company becomes the latest AI player to pitch its flagship LLM to Washington, a move widely seen as a bid to win favor with President Donald Trump’s administration. The announcement on Tuesday comes less than a week after OpenAI revealed a nearly identical deal, making ChatGPT available to the General Services Administration for the same token fee.
According to the Financial Times, the Claude agreement clearly states that federal agencies aren’t obligated to use the chatbot at all. Even if they do, Claude’s use will be limited to sensitive but unclassified work.
Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI have only recently been cleared to supply their chatbots to the US government. According to the Financial Times, Google is already working on a similar arrangement to offer its Gemini AI to federal agencies at a steeply discounted rate.
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Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service — which oversees procurement for US agencies — told the FT that the goal is simple: “get widespread adoption [of AI tools] in the federal government.”
So far, multiple federal agencies have already begun experimenting with AI tools. The Pentagon has awarded $200 million in contracts to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI. Wired has also reported on AI being used inside agencies like the GSA and HUD to identify redundant federal regulations, though according to their reporting, the results have been, at best, mixed.
Gruenbaum told the Financial Times that the government has no official preference for one AI provider over another. Still, it’s worth noting that President Trump has made it clear the White House will refuse to do business with what it calls “woke AI” — a label applied to any chatbot it deems to be pushing “partisan bias or ideological agendas.”
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
