Credit: Below the Sky / Shutterstock
Anthropic will give US government buyers a 40% discount on Claude under an expanded deal with the General Services Administration (GSA). The company announced it in a blog post on Tuesday, 27 October. For the first time, the discount also covers state, local, tribal and territorial governments.
It applies to Claude Enterprise, Claude for Government and the Claude API. The discount covers token-based usage across all Claude models available to the government, GSA said in its news release. Agencies have no minimum order and pay only for what they use.
“The discounts offered through the agreement are estimated to save the government $1 billion,” Anthropic wrote.
The end of the $1 offer
The deal replaces Anthropic’s first OneGov agreement from August 2025, which gave federal agencies Claude for a nominal $1. That offer expires on 31 October, Christian Robles reported for Nextgov/FCW. The new discount runs for 27 months, until 31 January 2029, according to a GSA website cited by Nextgov.
OpenAI agreed a similar deal with GSA, with a 50% discount on token-based usage. Its 27-month agreement started at the beginning of October, Nextgov reported. Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services said it planned a sole-source contract for Claude models, Nextgov added.
How agencies use Claude
About 500 US federal, state and local government organisations now use Claude, Anthropic said. Weekly active users of Claude for Government are up about eightfold since February. Usage across federal civilian agencies has grown about 20-fold in a year.
Utah gave Claude Code to 34 developers across 10 state agencies. In a four-week pilot, 71% of them said they saved 20 or more hours. A federal security team used Claude Mythos, the model Anthropic held back for safety, to find and patch a flaw. A human penetration test had missed it. More than half of US states took part in its cyber defence programme, the company said.
GSA said its OneGov programme has saved more than $1.8bn. About $1.6bn came from what it calls its “super intelligence agreements”.
The deal comes in the week Anthropic filed for its IPO on Nasdaq. The company has told IPO investors that US government actions could hit its business.
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