Scope of the agreement
Anthropic announced it is expanding its partnership with the US General Services Administration (GSA). The new agreement gives government agencies a 40% discount on Claude Enterprise, Claude for Government and the Claude API. For the first time the discount applies across every product surface, covering agencies that buy directly today and those purchasing through cloud providers in the coming months.
The discount extends beyond the federal government to state, local, tribal and territorial governments. There is no minimum spend commitment; agencies pay only for the usage they consume. Anthropic estimates the discounts will save the government $1 billion.
Usage figures
According to the company, roughly 500 US federal, state and local government organizations now use Claude. Weekly active users of Claude for Government are up about eightfold since February, and usage across federal civilian agencies has grown about 20-fold in a year.
Anthropic is also launching a dedicated program to help agencies implement and get the most out of Claude. The company says these programs are commonly used by its private sector customers and will be brought to public sector partners in the coming weeks.
Examples from the public sector
Per the examples shared by the company, Utah gave Claude Code to 34 developers across 10 state agencies; 80% had a working environment within 30 minutes and 71% reported saving 20+ hours by the end of the four-week pilot. A US state CIO said their team responded to a ransomware attack in 8 minutes instead of the usual 2-3 days thanks to Claude.
A US federal security team used Claude Mythos to detect and patch a vulnerability that could have allowed the takeover of a critical production system in about two days; a human penetration test the month before had missed it. A state IT developer moved nearly 900 API methods to a new framework in two days, a project that had been scoped for a month.
Security and compliance
Agencies can use Claude for their most sensitive unclassified work. Claude for Government, generally available since September 30, offers near-feature parity with commercial offerings at a FedRAMP High authorization level. Agencies building their own tools can access Claude through Amazon Bedrock or Google Cloud's Vertex AI; on Bedrock, Claude is authorized for FedRAMP High, with select models authorized for DoD IL4 and IL5 workloads.
