The U.S. General Services Administration, the agency that buys goods and services for the federal government, said on Oct. 27 that it had expanded its deal with Anthropic. Government buyers now get 40% off Anthropic's Claude AI, and the discount now reaches state, local, tribal and territorial governments as well as federal agencies, which the old offer did not. There is no minimum purchase: agencies pay only for what they use. Anthropic says the discounts are estimated to save the government $1 billion.
The deal changes how governments pay. Under the old offer, which GSA lists as ending on Oct. 31, federal agencies paid $1 per user, and no other level of government could take part. Now the discount applies to usage, which is measured in tokens, the small chunks of text, often parts of words, that AI models read and write. GSA says the new pricing scales with actual use, so the bill grows with how much an agency asks Claude to do.
Anthropic says the discount covers Claude Enterprise, Claude for Government and the Claude API. Anthropic says agencies can use Claude, including Claude for Government, for their most sensitive unclassified work, and the API is a connection that lets developers plug Claude into their own apps. Agencies can buy at the discount through GSA's standing governmentwide contracts today, and Anthropic says the discount will reach purchases through cloud providers in the coming months. Anthropic is also starting a program, in the coming weeks, to help agencies put Claude to work.
In September, GSA announced 50% off usage of OpenAI's ChatGPT models, in a similar 27-month offer that was expected to start on Oct. 1. GSA says its program of governmentwide deals has saved more than $1.8 billion so far, about $1.6 billion of it from AI agreements.
Anthropic says about 500 federal, state and local government organizations now use Claude, and that use across federal civilian agencies has grown about 20-fold in a year. Among its examples, Utah gave Claude Code, Anthropic's coding tool, to 34 developers in 10 state agencies for four weeks, and 71% said they saved 20 hours or more.
Neither Anthropic nor GSA has said how long the new offer runs, what prices the 40% is taken from, or how the $1 billion estimate was worked out or over what period. Whether states and cities sign up in large numbers is also not yet clear.