Expanding our partnership with GSA to bring Claude to all levels of government
anthropic.com34 points by matthieu_bl 7 hours ago
34 points by matthieu_bl 7 hours ago
40% discount across the board is pretty steep and while doing the extra work of providing FedRAMP compliance.
Genuine public service.
10-15% discount was sufficient to get listed.
Isn't Claude still considered a supply chain risk by the DoD? I guess that doesn't apply to non-military government agencies.
we're in the limbo zone where the rest of the government is basically ignoring the DoD's designation
You'll have to start with changing the mission statement at the bottom of your page to remove the term "AI".
s/a/s/g
Claude approves of your sed.
Funny thing is that it will just mess his whole message except for the "AI" lol
The company that claims it "may never be profitable" just signed a deal to take even more of your tax dollars, is what I'm reading.
GSA should be working to host its own inference and models for federal agencies, not selling out to unprofitable private infrastructure.
Read their SEC filing, then decide if the "discount" is sustainable as a multi-agency dependency for decades to come. Or just blindly accept this as a positive and downvote away.
This isn't the government subsidizing a private venture, it's a private venture offering a discount to the government. What does profitability have to do with whether or not the government should purchase their services?
If the service provider goes under, the govt wasted their money.
...no? Whatever value they got from inference they already did is still there? Of course the government still needs to worry about vendor lock-in, but they'd have to do that no matter what, and also general-purpose LLMs are relatively replaceable for most use cases.
If the company has a sustainable business model it will be profitable and hang around without jacking up prices. If not, you wasted time and money setting up the anthropic tool chain.
Given the statements in their SEC filing, it's not outlandish to consider the possibility of a long-term plan to make Anthropic models a nationalized, public utility before they go bankrupt.
If GSA is already considering vendor lock-in as they establish new public services across multiple agencies, the natural move is to build them to eventually transition to a federally-owned and operated provider. Especially with how involved the U.S. government is in limiting capabilities Anthropic provides to consumers today.
Except that work would be cheaper to set up and the cost would drop over time if they were using local llms. Every dollar paid to a 3rd party rental service is a dollar that is burned in the fireplace. We are paying more for the right to be stuck paying more forever, it's ridiculous.
Not a discount at all. Every dollar for a rented service is being flushed down the toilet. Industry is moving to local llms, the government should have been ahead of them.
Claude gov is AWS Bedrock hosted on GovCloud which is managed via GSA schedule and FEDRAMP. So… that’s how GSA does exactly that these days.
I'm of the mindset that "GovCloud" and related products that make government dependent on private companies for vast government services is a bad idea.
If it's critical infrastructure, it should be publicly owned, funded, and protected by the federal government directly. Not rented from someone else under contracts that can be violated.
GovCloud is not, Google (https://cloud.google.com/gov) and Azure (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/solutions/government) also provide said services
Notably, all three of those providers have an incentive to increase costs for taxpayers in order to serve their investors. And all of those providers have federal politicians invested in their stock price.
Huh – I always thought GSA was still full of Elon's minions.
Can Claude propose legislative fixes to eliminate giveaways to special interests ? If not, why not ?
"Can" and "will be used by the people in power to" are two different things. and "Can in a way that would work" is a whole nother thing.
There is a whole side of sci-fi that has explored the idea that AI government could finally cure us so much more than just one class of corruption. There are, however, new downsides.