OpenAI has decided to offer the ChatGPT Enterprise version to U.S. federal government agencies for $1 over the next year, which is expected to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in the institutional sector.
OpenAI announced on the 6th (local time) that it is providing a more secure and privacy-focused version of ChatGPT Enterprise to federal government employees. This will effectively be provided for free, allowing government employees to utilize ChatGPT without any expense.
ChatGPT Enterprise is a paid product for corporations, and unlike the $20 monthly subscription service for general users, the fees vary based on the size of the corporation. This extraordinary offering aims to expand the use cases of ChatGPT into the institutional sector and align with the White House's policy to encourage AI adoption.
Joe Larson, OpenAI's vice president of government affairs, noted, "This initiative focuses on spreading the adoption of AI across the entire federal institutional sector, not on competition, and the private sector is already actively embracing AI, so the government must not fall behind."
OpenAI plans to establish a dedicated community to allow federal government employees to use its tools more easily and provide customized training programs. Additionally, the company has made it clear that it will not use the data from these employees for training its AI models.
This announcement comes after the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) approved OpenAI, along with Google and Anthropic, as a supplier eligible for bulk purchases of AI software in the marketplace. The terms of the contracts with Google's AI model Gemini and Anthropic's Claude have not yet been disclosed.
According to OpenAI, approximately 90,000 public sector employees are currently using the company's AI technologies, including ChatGPT, within federal and state government agencies in the U.S., and the weekly user count for ChatGPT is around 700 million.