GSA OneGov AI Deals Move Past $1 Pricing as Federal Procurement Consolidates and the FAR Is Rewritten
In August 2025 three AI companies offered the US government their enterprise products for almost nothing. OpenAI put ChatGPT Enterprise on the table at $1 per agency for a year. Anthropic offered Claude for $1 across all three branches of government. Google came in at 47 cents for Gemini. All three went through OneGov, a program the General Services Administration launched in April 2025 to negotiate governmentwide deals directly with big software makers.
A year later the pilots are ending. OpenAI moved to usage-based pricing at 50% off its commercial rates from October 1, 2026, for more than two years. GSA says 3.5 million federal employees used ChatGPT under the pilot and claims $1.4 billion in savings, though neither figure has been checked independently. Anthropic’s offer was extended to October 31 and Google’s to November 15.
The $1 deals were a way in. The real story is what they ran through: a federal buying system that Washington has been centralizing and rewriting at the same time.
Photo: G. Edward Johnson, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
One buyer instead of hundreds
Executive Order 14240, signed on March 20, 2025, moved the purchase of common goods and services to GSA and made it the executive agent for governmentwide IT contracts. A later OMB memo told agencies to use GSA’s governmentwide vehicles first. In January 2026 GSA said it had saved more than $60 billion in contract costs since January 2025, set up an Office of Centralized Acquisition Services, and signed 17 OneGov agreements with discounts of up to 90%. Those are GSA’s own figures.
The logic is the one big companies use: buy as one customer and you get one price. Spread across hundreds of agencies, the federal government often negotiated the same license many times over.
Rewriting the rulebook
The Federal Acquisition Regulation, the FAR, runs to thousands of pages and governs almost every federal purchase. Executive Order 14275 of April 2025 ordered it cut back to what statute requires. Agencies adopted model deviations through 2025. Formal rulemaking started in June 2026 with four proposed rules covering about 20 parts of the FAR. Four more, covering 16 parts, came out on September 18, with comments due on October 19. That’s eight of twelve planned rules. None is final.
On cloud, FedRAMP is changing too. The program that authorizes cloud services for federal use passed 500 authorized services in March 2026. Its 20x initiative, launched in March 2025, aims to automate much of the authorization work and replace Low, Moderate and High with classes A to D. The consolidated rules become mandatory on January 1, 2027.
How it compares
Britain went down the same road earlier. Its G-Cloud framework has run since 2012, with £24.4 billion spent through it, about 60% with large firms. G-Cloud 15 went live in August 2026 with 4,233 suppliers. In April 2026 the Crown Commercial Service was folded into a new Government Commercial Agency.
The EU is moving in a different direction. On September 9, 2026, the Commission proposed a Public Procurement Act, a single regulation to replace three directives. Its headline is a European preference: public buyers could limit bids to EU suppliers or partners with trade agreements, demand EU origin, or reject bids with less than 50% EU or partner content. It would be voluntary at first, but the Commission could make it mandatory for some sectors. Public procurement is about 15% of EU GDP.
So the US is centralizing to cut prices, Britain built a marketplace to widen supply, and Brussels wants to steer spending toward European firms. All three are using procurement as policy.
What to watch
The $1 era is over, and the next test is price. If agencies that got used to AI tools at a token cost now pay half of commercial rates, budgets will show it within a year. The other test is the FAR rewrite. Fewer rules make buying faster. They also remove some of the guardrails that came from the failed IT projects of the past.