Anthropic is extending its agreement with the US General Services Administration to make Claude cheaper and easier for government agencies to adopt. The deal offers a 40% discount on Claude Enterprise, Claude for Government, and the Claude API, whether agencies purchase directly or through cloud providers as those options become available. It also covers state, local, tribal, and territorial governments. Agencies can pay only for what they use, with no minimum spending requirement; Anthropic estimates the arrangement could save the government $1 billion. A new implementation program will help public agencies put Claude to work. The company says about 500 government organizations already use it, with weekly active users of Claude for Government up eightfold since February and federal civilian-agency usage up twentyfold in a year.
Examples describe applications in software development, administration, and cybersecurity. In a Utah pilot, 71% of participating developers reported saving at least 20 hours over four weeks, while a state team reportedly used Claude to respond to a ransomware attack in eight minutes rather than the usual two or three days. Other examples include finding a serious vulnerability missed by a human penetration test, moving nearly 900 API methods to a new framework in two days, and documenting legacy systems while identifying risks. Claude for Government is available for sensitive unclassified work at FedRAMP High; Claude on AWS Bedrock and Google Cloud Vertex AI also has FedRAMP High authorization, with select Bedrock models approved for certain Defense Department workloads. Anthropic says Claude Enterprise is pursuing FedRAMP Moderate authorization.
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