OpenAI upgrades US government AI partnership, replacing $1/year pilot with half-price licenses for 23M civil servants
OpenAI and the US GSA announced on September 10 a new agreement running October 1, 2026 through December 31, 2028, waiving the $15/person/month license fee and offering 50% off API calls across federal, state, local and tribal agencies.
On September 10, 2026, OpenAI and the US General Services Administration (GSA) jointly announced an upgrade to their government AI partnership, replacing the previous $1/year pilot with a new agreement designed to drive AI adoption across the US public sector at scale. The new agreement runs from October 1, 2026 through December 31, 2028, a 27-month window. Under the deal, every eligible US government agency is exempted from the standard $15/person/month software license fee, receives a flat 50% discount on AI model API calls, and is not subject to any minimum consumption commitment. The discount is no longer limited to the federal government: for the first time it extends to state, local, and tribal agencies, covering roughly 23 million US civil servants. OpenAI cited government adoption results including the US CDC compressing public-health literature review from days or months to under 30 minutes, the Georgia State Department of Revenue cutting tax-form digitization from two weeks to 15 minutes, and North Carolina using AI to identify millions of dollars in unclaimed assets for residents. On data security, OpenAI committed that ChatGPT Enterprise used by government customers would not train or iterate on input or output data from public-sector work, providing end-to-end protection of government workflow data. Earlier in the week, a US Senate committee opened an investigation into OpenAI; the company also announced that it had solved a 90-year Millennium Prize problem in mathematics and was sued alongside Microsoft by two US newspapers over copyright.