AI Companies Offer Federal Model Access for Nominal Fees

OpenAI Inc., Anthropic PBC, and Google Public Sector have offered U.S. federal agencies one year of access to their artificial intelligence models for nominal fees. OpenAI Inc. and Anthropic PBC set their pricing at $1 per agency, while Google Public Sector priced its Gemini for Government program at $0.47 for 2026 to lower barriers to innovation.

Sid Ghatak, a former General Services Administration director and AI advisor to the Biden administration, cautioned that these low entry prices may obscure the fully loaded costs of implementation. He noted that agencies could face significant incremental charges for compute and inference, as well as expenses related to consolidating government data to ensure model reliability.

These promotional offers follow a larger procurement trend, highlighted by a $200 million contract the United States Department of Defense awarded to OpenAI Inc. in June to develop AI tools for national security applications.