Anthropic struck a deal with California Governor Gavin Newsom giving all state agencies and local governments access to Claude at a discounted price, along with training and support, according to TechCrunch. The press release frames Claude as helping state employees draft documents and analyze information, and the agreement follows Newsom’s March executive order pushing AI to make government more efficient while keeping safety standards. The deal deepens Anthropic’s state ties even as it clashes with the federal government, which signed with OpenAI and labeled Anthropic a “supply-chain risk” after the company sought to carve out protections against surveillance and autonomous-weapons use in a Pentagon contract. California’s CIO Chris Given told Politico that the supply-chain-risk designation “just didn’t come up” during negotiations.
