Expanding our partnership with GSA to bring Claude to all levels of government

Posted by matthieu_bl 1 day ago

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Comments

Comment by InvisibleUp 1 day ago

Isn't Claude still considered a supply chain risk by the DoD? I guess that doesn't apply to non-military government agencies.

Comment by mushufasa 1 day ago

we're in the limbo zone where the rest of the government is basically ignoring the DoD's designation

Comment by zombocomvibes 19 hours ago

Hegseth probably doesn't want to push the issue any further lest he invite more legal scrutiny.

Comment by pixelstack 11 hours ago

whole current american government is supply chain risk. What this gonna do to make it worse? lol

Comment by gigatexal 1 day ago

My question exactly. Interested in seeing how far they take this.

Comment by happytoexplain 1 day ago

You'll have to start with changing the mission statement at the bottom of your page to remove the term "AI".

Comment by seemaze 1 day ago

s/a/s/g

Comment by EdwardDiego 1 day ago

Claude approves of your sed.

Comment by amlib 1 day ago

Funny thing is that it will just mess his whole message except for the "AI" lol

Comment by Lukas_Skywalker 1 day ago

Clsude spproves!

Comment by chopete3 1 day 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.

Comment by aenis 1 day ago

Anthropic is giving nice discounts to volume customers these days. One can get more than 40% with a short one year commitment.

Comment by nxobject 1 day ago

Huh – I always thought GSA was still full of Elon's minions.

Comment by cwal37 1 day ago

Who's leasing his compute?

Comment by iAMkenough 1 day ago

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.

Comment by bradreaves2 1 day ago

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?

Comment by computably 1 day ago

If the service provider goes under, the govt wasted their money.

Comment by ameliaquining 1 day ago

...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.

Comment by bagacrap 1 day ago

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.

Comment by iAMkenough 1 day ago

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.

Comment by roosterIllusi0n 1 day ago

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.

Comment by ameliaquining 5 hours ago

Why would the government use local LLMs? Compute is a central example of the kind of thing that makes sense to outsource.

Comment by roosterIllusi0n 1 day ago

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.

Comment by sailfast 1 day ago

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.

Comment by iAMkenough 1 day ago

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.

Comment by sailfast 9 hours ago

It’s a good sentiment, but that’s not how it currently works outside of agencies like the NSA that have some special needs and maybe the technical capacity. (Granted it’s been a minute for me so maybe this has changed) Either way it’s all contractors for the most part. In-house roles are not as flexible and don’t pay market.

I don’t actually think you want the federal government doing their own cloud work tbh. It’s a hugely expensive endeavor and the incentives are not there to do it right across government.

These agreements are pretty iron clad and the data centers are often separate and have their own setups.

Once a cross-cutting services agency like DISA or GSA own the stuff they quickly become a bottleneck for government agencies because they can, and then each agency goes out and fights for their own budgets to avoid the bottleneck, and then we’re back to renting.

It’s often better for service to have separate agreements with agreed upon commercial providers for this reason.

Comment by iAMkenough 3 hours ago

The interstate highway system is also a hugely expensive endeavor, but boy am I grateful for it. Maybe we should privatize that too?

Comment by gnabgib 1 day ago

GovCloud is not, Google (https://cloud.google.com/gov) and Azure (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/solutions/government) also provide said services

Comment by iAMkenough 1 day ago

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.

Comment by sailfast 9 hours ago

Turns out anyone with a 401K is also invested.

But we’re also taxpayers. So maybe there’s an equilibrium.

Also ideally some competition between those providers that will keep prices in line. (Spoiler: it absolutely does)

GSA also requires that the government is the lowest cost customer so nobody on earth is allowed any better deal. This also applies pressure. You have to rely on incentives in the end.

If you assume nobody has any integrity and incentives are all fake and nobody will hold to their agreements then there isn’t really a “public” good anymore anyway so what’s the point in trying to make a public cloud? It would just lead to grift at larger scale that wouldn’t even benefit our stock portfolios.

Comment by euroderf 1 day ago

Can Claude propose legislative fixes to eliminate giveaways to special interests ? If not, why not ?

Comment by demritocracy 1 day ago

Claude2032.com

Comment by judge2020 1 day ago

"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.

Comment by criley2 1 day ago

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.