Just a week after OpenAI announced it would offer ChatGPT Enterprise to the entire federal executive branch workforce at $1 per year per agency, Anthropic has raised the stakes. The AI giant said Tuesday it would also offer its Claude models to government agencies for just $1 – but not only to the executive branch. Anthropic is targeting “all three branches” of the U.S. government, including the legislative and judiciary branches.
The move comes after OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind were added to the General Services Administration’s list of approved AI vendors that can sell their services to civilian federal agencies. TechCrunch has reached out to Google to see if it plans to respond to Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s challenges in kind.
Anthropic’s escalation – a response to OpenAI’s attempt to undercut the competition – is a strategic play meant to broaden the company’s foothold in federal AI usage.
“We believe the U.S. public sector should have access to the most advanced AI capabilities to tackle complex challenges, from scientific research to constituent services,” Anthropic said in a statement. “By combining broad accessibility with uncompromising security standards, we’re helping ensure AI serves the public interest.”
Anthropic will offer both Claude for Enterprise and Claude for Government. The latter supports FedRAMP High workloads so that federal workers can use Claude for handling sensitive unclassified work, according to the company.
FedRAMP High is a stringent security baseline within the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) for handling unclassified sensitive government data.
Anthropic will also provide technical support to help agencies integrate AI tools into their workflows, according to the company.
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Anthropic, along with OpenAI, xAI, and Google, has been granted up to $200 million by the Department of Defense to leverage AI for national security, but the AI firm clearly hopes to integrate into a broader array of government work, including science research and health services. Anthropic noted in its press release that Claude is already being used at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to accelerate scientific discoveries, and also by the District of Columbia Department of Health to help residents access health services in multiple languages.
Anthropic says it is able to make such deployments because Claude “meets the government’s highest security standards.” Aside from being certified for FedRAMP High, customers can access Claude through their existing secure infrastructure via partnerships with AWS, Google Cloud, and Palantir, giving them more control over their data.
Anthropic’s multi-cloud access could give it an edge in the competition with OpenAI, whose current official FedRAMP High offering is tied to Azure Government Cloud only. While Azure is widely adopted in government, some government agencies and security teams might prioritize data sovereignty, infrastructure control, and the operational flexibility a multi-cloud strategy offers.
OpenAI is, however, actively working to reduce its reliance on Azure so it can embrace a more diversified infrastructure approach.
