The rise of the $1 a year AI deal

• OpenAI and Anthropic are offering federal employees access to their AI models for little cost.
• The Trump administration also rolled out a government-wide chatbot platform.
• The jockeying shows how the AI race is unfolding in Washington.

While AI giants are breaking the bank to fund the future of the technology, two companies are hoping a single dollar fee can help them gain a foothold in Washington.

OpenAI and Anthropic are charging the Trump administration just $1 per agency to access their leading AI models for the next year.

In another sign of how competitive things remain, OpenAI announced its agreement for ChatGPT Enterprise access on August 6. Less than a week later, Anthropic announced a similar deal for access to Claude for Enterprise and Claude for Government.

Government contracts could be quite lucrative for AI companies. Anthropic already has a deal with the Pentagon that could be worth as much as $200 million.

"Some of these companies are going public, and if they can say their products are being used by government agencies, that boosts their long-term potential," Darrell M. West, a senior fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation, told Business Insider.

West said companies that aren't striking these types of agreements risk getting "squeezed out."

"There are a lot of AI companies now, but that is probably going to narrow in the future — some companies will do well and many are not going to make it — so if you are getting government employees to use your products, it increases the odds that you will be one of the survivors," he said.

Google might have a similar deal in the offing. Earlier this month, US General Services Administration added the tech giant's Gemini model to a list of approved AI vendors. After that announcement, OpenAI and Anthropic, which were also added to the list, announced their $1 per agency agreements.

Elon Musk's xAi was originally going to strike a similar partnership, but those talks fizzled out after Grok began posting antisemitic content, Wired reported.

Federal employees will have other avenues to use popular AI chatbots.

On Thursday, the US General Services Administration unveiled USAi, a secure platform where federal employees can experiment with AI models at no cost to them. The platform will initially feature models from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Anthropic, and OpenAI.

A GSA spokesperson told BI that Anthropic and OpenAI's nominal fee agreements "are not the same as the USAi access mechanism."

The partnerships follow President Donald Trump's unveiling of his AI action plan, a series of policies designed to keep the US at the forefront of the global AI race.

AI companies take maintaining the US's position seriously. Last year, Anduril and Palantir announced their own effort to outfit the government with AI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined Trump in January to announce Stargate, a $500 billion project that would help rebuild the AI giant's moat against Chinese competitors.

Anthropic's agreement also applies to all three branches, underlining that the deal extends to congressional employees.

Despite repeated efforts, Congress has been unable to pass a sweeping AI law. Most recently, lawmakers dealt some in the industry a setback after they stripped out a provision that would have imposed a decadelong moratorium on state-level AI laws from President Donald Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill." Its initial inclusion sparked bipartisan opposition. OpenAI, Meta, and Alphabet have all opposed previous state-level efforts to regulate the industry.

As Business Insider previously reported, some lawmakers remain skeptical of using AI chatbots themselves.