OpenAI, Google, Anthropic win US govt approval for civilian AI contracts

By Gregory Korte and Shirin Ghaffary

 

The US government’s central purchasing arm is adding OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Anthropic to a list of approved artificial intelligence vendors, opening the door to widespread adoption of the technology across civilian federal agencies. 

The move by the General Services Administration, to be announced Tuesday, will speed up the adoption of AI tools in the federal government by making them available through its Multiple Award Schedule, a federal contracting platform with contract terms already set. Without that flexibility, agencies would ordinarily spend months negotiating their own terms for use of the technology. 

GSA officials said the models from the three companies — OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude — were evaluated by several performance and security measures.  

The agency didn’t immediately disclose the terms of the contracts. But it’s used its buying power to negotiate deep discounts with software providers like Adobe Inc., Salesforce Inc. and Google. 

Other leading-edge AI companies would also be considered for the marketplace. The first three vendors were simply further along in the procurement process, the officials said. 

“We’re not in the position of picking winners or losers here. We want the maximum number of tools to provide to all federal government employees to make them as productive as possible,” said GSA Deputy Administrator Stephen Ehikian. “There’s going to be different tools for different use cases.” 

The move comes just days after President Donald Trump signed three executive orders aimed at reshaping the government’s role in AI, including a mandate that federal agencies only procure language models “free from ideological bias.”  

Enforcing the presidential ban on what Trump calls “woke AI” would be an agency-by-agency process, according to the GSA.

“But at the same time, this is a race, right? And as the president said, we’re going to win this race,” said Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service.  

Adding the three companies to the multiple award schedule — which makes commercial IT products more readily available to agencies — means federal bureaucrats can begin using large language models that had previously been restricted to smaller pilot projects or national security use. The Pentagon has already awarded AI contracts to OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, which are separate from the GSA’s announcements on Tuesday. 

Many agencies, including the Treasury Department and Office of Personnel Management, have already expressed interest in using the new platform, according to GSA officials. Under the previous presidential administration, federal agencies identified potential uses for AI such as processing patent applications, detecting tax fraud, reviewing grant submissions and copy-editing press releases. 

Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor said he envisions using AI to develop customer service chatbots and to summarize tens of thousands of public comments on rulemaking — a process that previously bogged down changes to regulations. 

But he said agencies will also have to hire savvy employees. “We’re probably missing people who are super conversant with very modern, AI-related stuff,” he said. 

“Clearly, we can’t just throw things against the wall and see what sticks,” Kupor said.