Anthropic Gives California Government a Discount on Claude

Anthropic will reportedly give California government workers expanded, discounted use of its Claude AI products.

The new arrangement follows a deal between the artificial intelligence (AI) company and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Politico reported Monday (June 29), and makes Claude the first AI tool available to all state agencies and local governments.

The goal is to increase adoption of Claude by reducing the chatbot’s price for government agencies and municipalities by half, the report said. The deal also includes free workforce training and technical support from Anthropic.

“A lot of departments are going to switch their usage to this contract, and that’s very much our intent,” Chris Given, California’s chief information officer and director of the state Department of Technology, told Politico. “When we see that folks are going to be using a tool more, we want to make sure that we, as the state, have negotiated the best possible price for them.”

As Politico noted, this deal comes amid Anthropic’s ongoing conflict with the White House. The administration has placed limits on the release of the company’s most advanced AI models and designated the startup a supply chain risk.

However, the government has since granted Anthropic approval to restore some access to its Mythos 5 AI model, according to a report last week from Bloomberg News.

Last week, Newsom launched a new tool to track AI-related job losses, following an executive order in May directing state agencies to to prepare workers, communities and small businesses for the economic and labor disruptions expected from AI advancement.

“AI should not replace the human work of government,” Newsom said in a statement about the Anthropic deal. “It should help our workers move faster, solve problems more effectively, and deliver better results for Californians.”

Meanwhile, research by PYMNTS Intelligence shows that while workers are encountering AI on the job, many of them have not been told how to use it.

That’s according to the PYMNTS Intelligence study “The Resilience Deficit: Labor Workers in an Automated Economy,” which surveyed members of the “Labor Economy,” defined as hourly workers earning up to $25 an hour and generally less than $50,000 per year.

Thirty-seven percent of those workers said their employer had introduced new automation or AI tools during the last 12 months. However, nearly 60% said they had not been trained on the new technology, and just 39% reported feeling confident they could find comparable-paying work if technology eliminated their current position.