The short answer: Through GSA's OneGov agreements. In August 2025, GSA negotiated government-wide deals that give participating federal agencies OpenAI's ChatGPT Enterprise for $1 per agency for a year, Anthropic's Claude (Enterprise + Government) for $1 across all three branches, and Google's Gemini for Government for 47 cents per agency for a year (an offer Google has said runs through 2026). Access flows through GSA's Multiple Award Schedule — start with your IT acquisition shop or GSA's OneGov team, and read the caveats below before you sign.
If you've heard a colleague say "we got ChatGPT for a dollar" and assumed they were exaggerating — they weren't. In a three-week stretch of August 2025, GSA announced back-to-back agreements with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google that priced frontier AI tools for the entire federal enterprise at less than the cost of a vending-machine soda. Here's how the deals work, how your agency actually gets access, and the parts of the story a former Contracting Officer would want you to read twice.
GSA launched the OneGov strategy in April 2025 with a simple premise: the federal government is the world's largest buyer of goods and services, but it has historically purchased like thousands of small customers. OneGov treats the government as one customer — GSA negotiates directly with the original equipment manufacturers (rather than through layers of resellers marking things up) to standardize terms and secure steep, government-wide discounts on commercial software. By the end of 2025, GSA had executed 19 OneGov agreements with major technology companies, with discounts running as high as 90 percent.
The AI deals are OneGov's headline act, and they align explicitly with the White House's America's AI Action Plan — the national strategy to accelerate federal AI adoption. GSA's announcements for all three deals cite the Action Plan directly: the policy goal is to get frontier AI into the hands of the federal workforce fast, and the $1 price tag is how you remove the procurement excuse.
One mechanical detail worth knowing: these agreements were executed as modifications to an existing GSA Multiple Award Schedule contract held by Carahsoft, the reseller that carries OpenAI and Anthropic on Schedule — a structure that mattered when the deals were protested (more below).
This is a fast-moving space, and two 2026 developments matter.
The Anthropic deal is entangled in litigation. A dispute between Anthropic and the Department of Defense over usage restrictions escalated in early 2026, and in February the administration directed federal agencies to cease use of Anthropic's technology. A federal court subsequently issued a preliminary injunction that lets non-DoD agencies continue using Claude while the litigation plays out, but DoD-side removals have proceeded. If your agency is weighing the Claude offer, confirm its current availability with GSA before building plans around it — the situation as described here is a snapshot, not a guarantee.
The deals survived a bid protest. Ask Sage filed GAO protests in August 2025 arguing the $1 agreements sidestepped competition and commercial-pricing requirements and lacked federal security authorizations. GAO dismissed the protests in December 2025 on standing grounds — because the deals were modifications to Carahsoft's existing Schedule contract, Ask Sage wasn't an "interested party." The merits were never reached, which means the underlying questions (especially about security authorizations) were dismissed, not answered.
There's no special contract vehicle to stand up and no FAR Part 15 source selection to run. The practical path:
$1 is an acquisition price, not a cost. This is a textbook land-and-expand motion: the vendor absorbs year one to get your workforce habituated, your workflows integrated, and your data patterns established — then renewal happens at commercial-style rates. Nobody has published standard year-two pricing, which is exactly why you should treat it as a real budget line now. Track adoption and usage during the intro term so you walk into the renewal negotiation with your own data, not just the vendor's.
Switching costs are the real price. After a year of prompts, custom workflows, and staff trained on one interface, moving to a competitor isn't free — which the vendors understand better than anyone. The protest that hit these deals raised vendor lock-in explicitly. The mitigation is boring and effective: keep your use cases portable, document your workflows, and let USAi keep the comparison shopping alive.
Security postures differ — check the specific product. Claude for Government supports FedRAMP High workloads; Google's Gemini in Workspace apps and the Gemini app carry FedRAMP High authorization. ChatGPT Enterprise contractually excludes business data from model training, but its federal authorization status was one of the unanswered protest questions. None of that is a reason to avoid these tools — it's a reason to map each offering to the sensitivity of the data your people will actually put into it, before rollout rather than after.
The deals cover the tools, not the transformation. A $1 license doesn't integrate the model with your case-management system, clean your data, write your acceptable-use policy, or train your workforce past the introductory materials. Those surrounding services — integration, support, change management — are real procurements at real prices, and they still need real cost estimates. If you're building the IGCE for that surrounding work, ArcPrice generates a defensible, market-researched estimate in minutes, free — and the rest of our free tools cover the clause matrix and beyond.
Through GSA's OneGov agreements. In August 2025, GSA negotiated government-wide deals that let participating agencies acquire OpenAI's ChatGPT Enterprise for $1 per agency for a year, Anthropic's Claude for Enterprise and Claude for Government for $1 (across all three branches), and Google's Gemini for Government for 47 cents per agency for a year. Access runs through GSA's Multiple Award Schedule — start with your agency's IT acquisition shop or GSA's OneGov team, and confirm the current terms before you commit.
The sticker prices are real but promotional: $1 per agency for roughly a year of ChatGPT Enterprise (plus a 60-day window of unlimited advanced-model use), $1 for Claude for Enterprise and Claude for Government, and 47 cents per agency for a year of Gemini for Government — an offer Google has said runs through 2026. Those figures cover the introductory term of the tools themselves, not steady-state renewal pricing and not implementation, integration, or training services.
That is the open question — and the point of the pricing. These are classic land-and-expand offers: the vendor absorbs year one to build adoption, then the agency negotiates renewal at commercial-style rates. Neither GSA nor the vendors have published standard year-two pricing, so agencies should budget for a real renewal cost, track usage data during the intro term, and start renewal conversations well before it ends.
It varies by product, and it is the detail to check hardest. Anthropic's Claude for Government supports FedRAMP High workloads, and Google's Gemini in Workspace apps and the Gemini app carry FedRAMP High authorization. OpenAI's ChatGPT Enterprise does not train on business inputs and outputs, but a 2025 GAO protest questioned its federal security authorizations (GAO dismissed the protest on standing grounds without reaching the merits). Match the specific offering to your data's sensitivity level before anyone pastes real agency information into it.
USAi (usai.gov) is GSA's secure, no-cost generative AI evaluation platform, launched in August 2025, that lets federal agencies test and compare models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta in a standards-aligned environment. The OneGov deals are the acquisition path; USAi is the try-before-you-buy sandbox — a sensible first stop before an agency commits to one vendor's ecosystem.
ArcPrice builds a defensible, market-researched IGCE for the integration, support, and implementation services the $1 deals don't cover. AI-powered, free, no login required.