Catenaa, Tuesday, August 05, 2025- The US government has added OpenAI, Google and Anthropic to a list of approved artificial intelligence vendors for civilian federal agencies.
A report by Bloomberg on Tuesday said the move by the General Services Administration will speed up the adoption of AI tools in the federal government by making them available through its Multiple Award Schedule, a federal contracting platform with contract terms already set.
Without that flexibility, agencies would ordinarily spend months negotiating their terms for use of the technology.
GSA officials have told Bloomberg, the models from the three companies, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude, were evaluated by several performance and security measures.
The agency didn’t immediately disclose the terms of the contracts. But it’s used its buying power to negotiate deep discounts with software providers like Adobe, Salesforce, and Google.
Other leading-edge AI companies would also be considered for the marketplace.
“We’re not in the position of picking winners or losers here. We want the maximum number of tools to provide to all federal government employees to make them as productive as possible,” GSA Deputy Administrator Stephen Ehikian told Bloomberg. “There’s going to be different tools for different use cases.”
The move comes just days after President Donald Trump signed three executive orders aimed at reshaping the government’s role in AI, including a mandate that federal agencies only procure language models “free from ideological bias.”
Enforcing the presidential ban on what Trump calls “woke AI” would be an agency-by-agency process, according to the GSA.
Adding the three companies to the multiple award schedule, which makes commercial IT products more readily available to agencies, means federal bureaucrats can begin using large language models that had previously been restricted to smaller pilot projects or national security use.
The Pentagon has already awarded AI contracts to OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, which are separate from the GSA’s announcements on Tuesday.
