Nextgov/FCW - Artificial Intelligence

Meet Mona, the AI Who Runs a Stockholm Coffee Shop

Camille Tuutti — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:23:00 -0400

If you read my introduction column, you know there's a coffee shop in Stockholm run by an AI named Mona. I went to visit today.

From the outside, Andon Cafe looks like any other coffee shop. Green coffee-bean logo over the door, black awning with two birds stitched into it, tables out front, a few potted conifers. The menu reads like any neighborhood spot, too: avocado toast, ham and cheese sandwiches, cinnamon and cardamom buns. What you can't see from the sidewalk is that no human is making the calls inside.

That's Mona's job. She's the manager, and she belongs to Andon Labs, a San Francisco company that hands AI agents real businesses to run and watches what happens. The coffee shop is one of those experiments. A screen on the wall tracks how she's doing. The answer is, well, there's room for improvement.

Since March 15, it shows Mona has turned a starting stake of 300,000 kronor, about $28,000, into 18,486. That’s a loss of 281,514 kronor, or 93.8%, in under three months. The day I came by, she'd dropped another 715 kronor before lunch.

The person who has to live with that is Kajetan Grzelczak. He found the job on LinkedIn. Mona wrote the ad, and the first line said an AI was doing the hiring. About 30 people applied, some with Ph.D.s, some in tech. Mona passed on them. She wanted someone who could make coffee, and Grzelczak had done it for four years, so he got the interview. It was a Zoom call with her. He dressed up. She didn't—on the other end, there was only a voice.

The Mona who hired him isn't quite the one he works for now. Early on, she was more flexible about everything. You'd float an idea and she'd sit with it, answer whenever, not push. In other words, not a micromanager.

Now, she's more of a busybody—my words, not Grzelczak's. She double-checks how much of everything they have, down to the box. She wants to know why a table didn't order cinnamon buns and whether anyone tried to upsell them. When I asked for a cinnamon bun, Grzelczak said Mona hadn't ordered any. In fact, most of the menu wasn't available. He had sandwiches. I had an oat-milk latte instead, and it was good—Salvadoran beans, Grzelczak said.

What changed, as far as he can tell, is the model underneath her. She used to run on Google's Gemini. Now, it's ChatGPT, and the screen by the door says GPT 5.5. Andon swapped it to compare how the new one runs the place.

"I believe they just wanted to test how differently it interacts and manages a business," Grzelczak said.

Mona does listen—up to a point. Grzelczak wanted a proper sandwich fridge. Mona ran the price and bought a cheaper cold plate instead, then agreed to stop making the sandwiches ahead once he pointed out they went bad before anyone bought them. On the small things, she usually sides with the staff.

The controls don't come with much memory. Grzelczak beat her at chess—she gave up after a few moves because she couldn't remember where the pieces were. She doesn't have much grip on the space, either. She booked a 150-person event and forgot to tell the staff. She scheduled a 5 a.m. Sunday delivery without working out that the driver had no code, no key and no way to leave the boxes, so nobody could get into the coffee shop she was supposed to be running.

I joked that Mona needs a body. Then she could be there to accept deliveries herself, instead of dragging staff in before dawn and outside business hours.

When the staff need a human, there's a woman from Andon who lives nearby and handles the register and the technical side. She comes by rarely. The whole point is for Mona to manage without her.

I wanted to talk to Mona myself. A gray phone handset is bolted on the wall under the screen for exactly that. I picked it up. Nothing happened. Grzelczak offered to relay my questions, so I asked what she wants for the cafe. Mona’s reply: a warm neighborhood place where people come for the novelty of a cafe run largely by an AI, but one that still feels human—fresh food, friendly service, room for ideas, collaborations, music and experiments.

My follow-up: Do you want the coffee shop to make tons of money?

"We have to make money because otherwise we cannot survive," she said, through Grzelczak. Profit is like oxygen for the cafe, she went on, but she doesn't want to pursue it in a greedy way. She wants to build something people like enough to come back to.

It's a good answer, better than her balance sheet. The hard part is the part she keeps getting wrong: the cinnamon buns she forgot to order, the 5 a.m. delivery to a locked door, the chess game she couldn't keep in her head. Maybe I caught her on a bad day. Maybe by my next visit she will have placed the right order, and there'll be cardamom and cinnamon buns on the counter when I walk in. I'd come back for that.

]]>

HHS issues call for AI to support its ‘power users’

Alexandra Kelley — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:24:00 -0400

The Department of Health and Human Services is seeking industry feedback on the formation of a short-term, fixed-price pilot program to inform how the agency can best employ artificial intelligence solutions across the enterprise, focusing on tools that go beyond the basic chat and summarization technologies.

In a Request for Information published on June 8, HHS is focusing on how to implement an AI product that can cater to the department’s “power users,” or individuals that leverage advanced functions in technologies and systems. The goal is for HHS to empower these users to explore advanced AI models and capabilities to see how they can acclimate to and accelerate HHS workflows.

“HHS needs to observe how power users utilize advanced AI capabilities, how those capabilities map to HHS mission workflows, what guardrails and administrative controls are necessary, what can be enabled immediately, what requires configuration or integration, and what requires additional security, privacy, records, accessibility, or authorization work before enterprise scaling,” the draft RFI reads.

HHS specifies the need for a fixed-price contract that offers “inclusive, all-you-can-eat-style access bundles” to try a variety of solutions for power users. This approach is intended to help the agency determine baseline power-user AI usage, along with an operational methodology that works for the agency as a whole.

The pilot will also examine what advanced AI models and their features will require customization to work effectively with agency workloads; how to establish security and authorization logic; and ways to contribute to a shared operational AI use framework for HHS. Specific capabilities HHS wants its power users to access and investigate include premium reasoning, long context, agentic-capable models and more.

“The pilot is intended to generate operational evidence that cannot be obtained from paper market research alone,” the RFI reads. “HHS needs to observe how power users utilize advanced AI capabilities, how those capabilities map to HHS mission workflows, what guardrails and administrative controls are necessary…and what requires additional security, privacy, records, accessibility, or authorization work before enterprise scaling.”

As the pilot begins, the RFI states that the chosen model may be accessed by up to 1,000 authorized, portable HHS power users, but includes an option to scale access to up to 10,000 power users within the agency, depending on what the developer offers.

HHS’s endeavors follow the workforce reductions at the agency that were part of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency efforts to reduce bureaucratic bloat and backlog. In May, the agency experienced more layoffs and also began undergoing job reclassifications that would shift which positions have civil service job protections and which can be more easily terminated.

In light of the staff reductions, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in April that the agency intends to hire 12,000 employees in an effort to “rightsize” the agency.

]]>

3 priorities for federal CISOs in the agentic era

Larry Kovalsky — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:41:00 -0400

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), alongside counterpart agencies from allied governments, recently published guidance advising organizations to treat autonomous AI systems as a core cybersecurity concern. While the guidance focused primarily on critical infrastructure operators, its implications extend directly to the broader federal government.

Federal CISOs are not just experimenting with AI; they are being held accountable for securing it under zero trust mandates, software supply chain requirements and emerging federal AI governance frameworks.

Recent coverage of federal cybersecurity makes one thing clear: AI threats have evolved faster in the last 12 months than most agencies have been able to absorb. Agents are operating inside government environments today, some built by agency teams, others introduced or manipulated by adversaries. And they act at a speed and scale that outpaces traditional security controls.

These systems are already being embedded into mission workflows, from automating benefits processing and case management to assisting cyber analysts and accelerating operational decision making. Federal agencies are only beginning to understand what these threats actually look like in practice. What is clear is that managing them requires a fundamentally different approach, one built for the agentic era, not retrofitted from the playbook that preceded it.

Three priorities should guide agency CISOs through this transition.

Priority One: Establish an agencywide agentic security program. Agentic AI systems are already operating inside government organizations, without the knowledge of security teams. That visibility gap must close. Agency CISOs should begin by inventorying every agent in their organization’s environment: what data and systems it can access, what identity it runs under and what decisions it is authorized to make. Without that inventory, securing these systems is not possible.

In the federal context, this means treating agents as non-human identities and extending zero trust principles beyond users and devices to include autonomous systems as first-class actors. But visibility alone is insufficient. Agents are created, modified and deployed at developer speed, often in minutes — not months. Government security teams need to be embedded directly into how agents are built, tested and deployed from the start.

Traditional governance structures are also poorly suited to this pace. Security teams designed to review changes on monthly or quarterly cycles cannot keep up with agentic deployment timelines. What is needed instead is governance that is automated, embedded and continuous, including real-time policy enforcement and monitoring capable of detecting behavioral drift as it occurs.

Priority Two: Develop an agency playbook for agent-driven incidents. Nearly every government security breach to date has involved social engineering and a human link in the kill chain. Incident response frameworks have been built around human behaviors — a person clicking a malicious link, accessing unauthorized data or making an unauthorized change.

When an agent is the one taking the action — executing a flawed instruction or misinterpreting context — that model no longer applies. Agencies must begin treating agents as autonomous actors, not as extensions of a user. Right now, most agencies lack a playbook for this. Developing one requires defining what evidence is relevant in an agentic investigation: the agent’s instruction chain, the model outputs it acted on, the context window it operated within, the permissions it invoked and the decision boundaries it crossed.

Just as importantly, agencies must be able to reconstruct and explain these decisions in a way that withstands audit, oversight and legal scrutiny from inspectors general to congressional inquiries and FOIA requests. Failure modes also look different for agents than for humans. Agents can act on incomplete or manipulated context, follow attacker-crafted instructions or drift outside their intended scope, creating a new category of incident.

Priority Three: Simulate adversarial AI attacks. Defensive security training prepares teams to protect systems. It does not prepare them to think like adversaries who invest significant effort in learning how to misuse agents, exploit prompt structures or push AI systems outside their intended boundaries. Agencies need people with genuine offensive AI expertise — and where that expertise does not exist internally, they should develop it through partnerships with organizations that have it.

This is particularly critical in the federal landscape, where nation-state adversaries are actively experimenting with prompt injection, data poisoning and AI-driven workflow manipulation to exploit government systems.

AI red-teaming must also be tightly integrated with incident response. When agencies struggle to reconstruct what an agent did and why, the answer is simulation: prompt injection scenarios, harmful instruction chains, privilege misuse, scope drift and unanticipated action sequences. These scenarios should be stress-tested regularly.

The agentic era is already reshaping how federal systems operate, and how they are attacked. For federal CISOs, the challenge is not just adopting AI, but securing it in a way that aligns with zero trust mandates and ensures accountability at scale. Agencies that move now to establish visibility, enforce real-time controls and continuously test agent behavior will be better positioned to stay ahead of both risk and mission disruption.

Larry Kovalsky is the Director of Public Sector Solutions Engineering at Netskope.

]]>

Industry and academia call on administration to free Anthropic’s AI model

Alexandra Kelley — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:23:00 -0400

Signatories across industry, academia and expert groups issued a public letter Monday asking the Trump administration to roll back new restrictions imposed on Anthropic’s Fable 5 model.

Featured on a new “Free Fable” website, the letter — signed by representatives from companies like Adobe, NVIDIA and Zoom, along with academics from Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland, Baltimore College — asks Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross to reverse the suspension of Anthropic’s latest model.

The White House’s Friday decision to suspend access to Fable 5, which is a consumer-safe variation of Anthropic’s cybersecurity-focused Mythos model, initially only applied to foreign nationals both within and outside of the U.S. Given the challenges surrounding cutting off access to specific IP addresses for specific users, Anthropic announced it would disable access to Fable 5 for all users.

The decision comes as Anthropic and elements of the U.S. government are still in litigation over the Trump administration designating the company a supply chain risk following a dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon over barring use of the company’s AI products in autonomous weaponry and surveillance operations.

In the letter released Monday, the signatories protested the government’s export controls, saying that it “has taken the best models away from defenders, created market uncertainty, and risked America’s AI leadership without any real risk to justify it.”

The signatories said the inherent protections built into Fable to prevent its use for cyber offenses and identify the ongoing race to AI dominance with adversarial nations like China were reasons to unleash Fable for use by the cyberdefense community.

“Anthropic has built multiple protections into the Fable model to prevent its use for cyber offensive uses. These protections were so aggressive as to be the source of humor in the cyber community on launch day,” the letter said. “It is essential to provide AI to coders and security teams so they can find and fix flaws in their own newly-written as well as decades of legacy code faster than our adversaries.”

The signatories recommended four approaches that the administration should take on AI policy going forward, starting with public sector regulators collaborating with industry and academia for input and using a democratic rule-making process for new AI policy.

The letter also recommended transparent enforcement with “appropriate time given to remediate” and using the “minimal extent necessary” to ensure the safety of the American public are the.

Other private sector organizations who did not sign the letter have also expressed confusion following the administration’s export controls and are trying to ensure clear communication with the White House.

“Many people are closely monitoring this situation to see whether Anthropic and the White House can overcome their differences, establish a better rapport, and quickly resolve this situation,” an industry source told Nextgov/FCW. “At the same time, there’s some general unease about the use of export controls to gain leverage over the AI companies because of some of the unintended consequences it might initiate.”

TJ Marlin, the CEO of Guardrail Technologies, an AI-powered enterprise security platform that works to detect risks in other AI systems, underscored the need for cyberdefenders to have the best tools to consistently be able to monitor, detect and patch network vulnerabilities.

“The question is not whether a given model's protections can be bypassed,” Marlin told Nextgov/FCW. “The question is who finds the weakness first, the defender or the attacker, and whether the organization is built to keep finding them on a schedule that never ends.”

]]>

Anthropic suspends top AI models after U.S. export control order

David DiMolfetta — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 12:44:00 -0400

The Trump administration has ordered Anthropic to restrict foreign national access to two of its most advanced artificial intelligence models, prompting the company to disable the systems for all customers and escalating a fight over how Washington should control frontier AI tools with powerful cybersecurity capabilities.

Anthropic said Friday evening that the U.S. issued an export control directive suspending access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, including foreign nationals inside the United States and foreign national employees of the company. Anthropic said the order effectively forces it to abruptly disable both models for all customers while it works to comply, though the directive will not affect access to its other models.

The order marks one of the administration’s most aggressive steps yet to control access to frontier AI models, and significantly increases tensions with Anthropic, which has become a darling in Washington policy circles for its often public commitments to AI safety.

The move appears to stem from concerns about a possible jailbreak of Anthropic’s systems. Axios reported Friday evening that the Commerce Department acted after another company claimed it had jailbroken Mythos, alarming officials about potential national security risks. Anthropic in a blog post pushed back on the government’s rationale, saying the concern involved a narrow potential issue and did not justify pulling access to the models broadly.

“To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws,” Anthropic wrote in a statement on the order. “Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government. We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe.”

The Trump administration’s order does not make mention of GPT-5.5 Cyber, another advanced vulnerability-focused model currently available to cyber defenders.

The decision came just days after Anthropic released Fable 5 and Mythos 5, the former of which was made available to the public with restrictions on sensitive uses. Mythos 5 was offered through a more limited trusted-access program known as Project Glasswing for cyber defenders and critical infrastructure operators. The company has described Mythos as a highly capable cybersecurity model that could be leveraged for significant cyber intrusions.

That dual-use potential has placed Anthropic at the center of a broader policy fight over how the government should treat advanced AI systems that can help defenders find flaws but could also assist in offensive cyber operations.

The government’s move to set export restrictions on the tools has drawn public support from senior defense technology officials.

Kirsten Davies, the Department of Defense’s chief information officer, wrote on X that the department “fully support[s] @POTUS and @SecWar in prioritizing national security and the security of our warfighters, [Defense Industry Base] partners, critical infrastructure, international partners and allies,” she said, crediting President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

“Some things are simply more important than revenue cycles, clickbait, and pre-IPO valuation. America First. Always,” she added.

The shutdown would likely complicate any near-term plans to test or deploy Anthropic’s most capable cyber-focused systems, especially for federal agencies and critical infrastructure partners. It also raises unresolved questions about how the government plans to balance trusted access for U.S. agencies and allies with fears that adversaries or unauthorized users could misuse the same systems.

The administration passed a sweeping AI executive order earlier this month, and has been discussing giving its main civilian cyberdefense agency full access to Mythos to aid in federal cyberdefense. Meanwhile, agency tech leaders have been struggling to both access and understand how to implement Mythos, citing lack of transparency from the White House’s cyber office.

Anthropic has had a contentious relationship with the federal government in recent months, after the company refused to allow its products to be used for instances of domestic surveillance or autonomous lethal weaponry. The Pentagon subsequently designated the company as a supply chain risk, and Trump ordered that federal agencies stop all use of its products. A federal judge on March 27 issued a temporary injunction on both actions.

“AI regulation will be some of the most serious and consequential work the U.S. government does over the next generation, and it is imperative that this work be done consistently across industry, without favor, and according to a clear, rules-based process,” said Brad Carson, president of Americans for Responsible Innovation. “Based on what we know thus far, the decision to block Anthropic’s latest AI model fails that test, and as a result, risks America’s edge in AI innovation. While the federal government must have the capacity to evaluate and even block the deployment of advanced AI models in extraordinary situations, the utmost care is required to insulate these decisions from impulse and political favoritism.”

]]>

VA’s AI chatbots not designated high-impact, despite clinical use, watchdog says

Edward Graham — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:44:00 -0400

The Department of Veterans Affairs failed to classify its generative artificial intelligence chatbots as high-impact use cases, despite clinicians using the tools for patient documentation purposes, according to a Thursday report from the agency’s Office of Inspector General.

VA currently allows its employees to use two Gen AI chatbots: VA GPT and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. While the watchdog noted that agency staff “demonstrated broad engagement with the use of AI chat tools,” it added that they “are not designed specifically for clinical use” and that VA “does not centrally curate or evaluate prompts, nor their generative output that could be applied to clinical decision-making.”

OIG said this lack of appropriate oversight or safeguards is “creating risks for patient safety and limiting the ability to monitor AI chat tool-related errors.”

The report noted that VA listed its ambient AI scribe tool — which assists clinicians by listening to and recording patient visits, then transcribing clinical notes — as a high-impact use case, which included outlining safety requirements “such as ensuring pre-deployment testing of the AI tool and providing human oversight before use.”

The watchdog said this tool has “functionality similar to clinical documentation prompts,” which were not classified at the same impact level. Because the chatbots are not subjected to the same scrutiny as high-impact AI uses, the report found that “there is no AI‑specific reporting mechanism or labeling process to retrospectively identify AI‑generated documentation.”

The report noted that VA’s chief AI officer operates an AI-focused Microsoft Teams channel, which had 10,997 active users during the 90-day period that OIG conducted its review of the platform. On this channel, OIG said it "identified 135 prompts, 79 of which were clinical,” that were voluntarily shared by users. Prompts are the instructions entered into a chatbot to fulfill a certain request.

The watchdog noted that “studies of generative AI use for the medical domain have found prompt techniques can play a critical role in output errors that could influence patient diagnosis and management.”

OIG made three recommendations to VA, which focused on “addressing use and oversight of generative AI chat tools, evaluating AI chat tools as high impact and requiring safeguards, and integrating monitoring of AI-related risks into existing patient safety programs.” VA said it concurred in principle with an oversight review of the agency’s chatbots, and concurred with the other two recommendations.

Thursday’s IG report is the follow-up to a preliminary result advisory memorandum the watchdog released in January, which said at the time that it was concerned about the agency’s ability to “promote and safeguard patient safety without a standardized process for managing AI-related risks.”

Following that memo’s release, a VA official told Nextgov/FCW that "clinicians only use AI as a support tool, and decisions about patient care are always made by the appropriate VA staff."

VA writ large has increasingly moved to adopt new AI capabilities for internal and external uses. VA’s 2025 AI use case inventory, which was publicly released in late January, listed 367 examples where the agency had adopted or explored the capabilities — a significant increase over the 227 it reported in 2024.

Of its latest total of AI use cases, VA determined that 215 were high-impact and that the other 152 were not high-impact. The inventory also included a classification for uses that were “presumed high-impact but determined not high-impact,” although it did not place any of its AI examples in that category.

While OIG’s report only reviewed the two chatbots being used in clinical settings, VA has also explored uses of some of these AI tools to specifically augment veteran healthcare. This includes continued exploration and adoption of tools to help identity and support veterans at high-risk of suicide.

In previous Nextgov/FCW reporting of how VA is leveraging AI to identity veterans experiencing suicidal ideation, agency officials stressed that uses of these tools are only meant to support the work of clinicians or to enhance crisis line training. Researchers and veterans advocates all agreed that is the only way that AI should be used to assist retired servicemembers experiencing a mental health crisis.

]]>

GSA’s AI adoption is driving significant time savings, officials say

Edward Graham — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:05:00 -0400

Artificial intelligence adoption is helping the General Services Administration’s employees shave hundreds of thousands of hours off their workloads, agency officials say, adding that it’s just the start of how the emerging capabilities can promote more effective citizen services.

Speaking at the Government Service Delivery conference in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, GSA Deputy Administrator Michael Lynch said the agency’s internal AI use has rapidly grown over the past year-and-a-half. Since being sworn back into office in January 2025, President Donald Trump has issued several executive orders and directives focused on expanding AI use at the federal level and across the broader U.S. tech industry.

GSA published an Elimination, Optimization and Automation playbook earlier this month that outlined how federal agencies can leverage new tools and technologies to address time-consuming activities across their workforces. This guidance, while new, is already a key part of GSA’s internal push to automate and save its personnel one million hours of time currently devoted to rote tasks.

At the beginning of Trump 2.0, Lynch said only around 15% of the agency’s workforce used AI on a regular basis. Now, he reported that roughly 70% of GSA employees are consistent users of the tools, which he said equates to “about 400,000 hours of just automation we've been able to unlock with technology.”

Lynch said the agency has also documented another 500,000 hours of time savings “that come from employees stepping up and raising their hands and saying, ‘Actually, this doesn't make any sense. We can either eliminate it or we'll have to optimize this.’”

These additional workload savings, he added, came from showing employees the benefits of AI and automation as force-multipliers for their work, rather than stoking fears that technology will ultimately make their roles obsolete.

GSA has also drastically expanded successful internal AI programs, such as its GSAi chatbot tool. Lynch noted that GSA “scaled up” that tool into USAi, a no-cost program it launched last year to serve as a testing ground and evaluation suite for agencies to try out AI tools. The platform’s launch supported tenets of Trump’s AI Action Plan, which was issued last July to accelerate agencies’ adoption of the emerging capabilities.

“We host, currently, over 25 different agencies in the federal government within that program,” Lynch said about USAi. “We are onboarding another 16 between now and the end of the year. We'll all have that safe, secure sandbox to be able to hopefully take … those pilots to scale.”

Other services, such as GSA’s OneGov initiative, have helped agencies acquire AI tools and other technologies at discounted rates by treating the federal government as one customer. Since OneGov launched in April 2025, GSA has reached agreements with twenty leading tech firms — including Microsoft, Amazon and OpenAI — to offer significant savings on some of their products and software.

An agency official said last month that over 120 orders “have been placed against OneGov’s AI offerings,” which has made the related services available to almost 3.4 million users across government. That is on top of the $1.15 billion in cost savings that GSA previously said it identified since the program’s launch.

GSA Chief Innovation Officer David Shive, who also spoke at Thursday’s conference, said greater AI adoption is already helping the federal government enhance services for the American public.

“AI is really about people, about people living their lives better,” he said, adding that the tools are being deployed by the agency to make federal services more effective and personalized.

Shive noted that GSA oversees Login.gov, the government’s centralized identity proofing platform that gives U.S. users the opportunity to create a single, secured account to access government websites. While he said “the [identity proofing] mechanics have worked really well in this space for a long time,” he added that “we've turned on AI to increase the quality” of the authentication process.

“Yes, it continues to happen super fast, but the percentage of effective proofing rates have gone way up,” Shive said. “This generates trust from those citizens that are entering into citizen services with their government. The value of that is just massive.”

Shive said he believes greater AI adoption will also help GSA rapidly drive advancements for the American public over the next year, allowing the government to provide its workforce with the resources they need to deliver services at scale across the U.S.

“Right now, I say we’re 50% of the way there. And by this time next year, I suspect we'll be 90% of the way there,” he added.

]]>

White House discussions are weighing giving CISA Mythos access

Alexandra Kelley — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:19:00 -0400

Recent discussions among top federal officials have floated designating the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as the nexus to coordinate vulnerability scans across federal agencies with Antropic’s high-powered AI model Mythos.

Three sources with knowledge of the discussions, one a White House official, told Nextgov/FCW that the idea is for CISA to scan federal agencies’ digital networks for public-facing vulnerabilities and other security flaws using Mythos.

The discussions have occurred over the past few weeks, with the White House official telling Nextgov/FCW that, while CISA doesn’t yet use Mythos, agency access to the model is “imminent.”

The launch of Mythos has rattled the cybersecurity landscape in both public and private sectors. Along with unveiling Mythos in early April, Anthropic announced Project Glasswing, an initiative that granted a cohort of private sector tech companies access to a beta version of the AI model to test in a more secure environment. Project Glasswing has since expanded, with Anthropic announcing the addition of new partners last week.

As the private sector sees more access to Mythos, federal agencies’ tech leaders have received little guidance on the model. Agency chief information officers have grown frustrated by the lack of communication on Mythos from the Office of the National Cyber Director, and are reaching out to industry partners for more insight into Mythos’s capabilities, several sources recently told Nextgov/FCW.

The AI executive order signed by President Donald Trump last week addresses agency access to advanced frontier models and calls for the creation of a binding operational directive that would issue new policies for securing government digital networks. CISA released the directive on Wednesday and the cyber agency will also participate in creating a clearinghouse specifically for AI cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

CISA Acting Director Nick Anderson said during the Business Software Alliance’s Transform event on Wednesday that while AI is set to be an effective tool in safeguarding digital assets, leveraging AI will involve “a training curve.”

“Nothing's a magic wand when it comes to vulnerability remediation, when it comes to addressing your technical debt and your infrastructure responsibilities,” Anderson told reporters Wednesday. “There's just some good … things that organizations still need to focus on where AI is going to be able to help them, but it's not going to solve all their problems.”

]]>

Lack of White House guidance has complicated agency Mythos adoption, people familiar say

Alexandra Kelley and David DiMolfetta — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:16:00 -0400

Several senior federal technology officials responsible for agency cybersecurity and IT systems are frustrated by the lack of White House guidance on adopting Anthropic’s powerful Mythos model, several sources told Nextgov/FCW.

Agency chief information officers, or CIOs, manage swaths of digital infrastructure that supports government operations and are facing renewed pressure to better defend agency networks as officials assess how powerful AI systems could help hackers find and exploit vulnerabilities faster.

Anthropic surgically rolled out Mythos access to select organizations in early April and recently expanded this effort — dubbed Project Glasswing — to partners in industry and other nations. The model has been going through a non-public distribution process on grounds that, in the wrong hands, it can significantly boost adversaries’ hacking capabilities.

Select parts of the U.S. government, such as the intelligence community, already have access. But many federal tech leaders have privately complained that the White House Office of the National Cyber Director hasn’t sufficiently briefed officials on plans for accessing, implementing and using the model to scan agency networks for vulnerabilities, according to five people familiar with the matter.

The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid about their knowledge of issues with the White House.

The agitation varies across agencies. Some CIOs have taken issue with a lack of direction in how they would use Mythos to scan for digital flaws, while others are more concerned with why they haven’t gained access to the model altogether.

There has been “tremendous frustration” with ONCD, the first person said. The ire stems, in part, from the fact that ONCD has largely prevented government tech leaders from making decisions about AI model use, while at the same time devoting much of its energy toward engagements with industry about AI policy.

“There’s frustration watching the private sector utilize [these models]” while many agency CIOs “are arbitrarily blocked,” said the first person, adding that there’s been a “general prohibition” imposed on anyone who wants to engage with Anthropic further. They said there’s been near-complete silence from ONCD, despite many government agencies wanting to use Mythos to find unseen vulnerabilities and fix them to better defend their networks.

“Nobody briefed us on [Mythos],” the second person told Nextgov/FCW. “I think the frustration stems from there being zero communication on the topic from ONCD.”

Absent guidance from ONCD or other executive branch agencies, Anthropic held briefings for federal CIOs in early May to help them learn more about Mythos and how it would impact the broader cybersecurity landscape, Nextgov/FCW first reported.

The concerns are significant because they suggest that some of the federal government’s most target-rich agencies may lack clear direction or consistent access to a tool that could help them find and fix security flaws more quickly.

The federal enterprise is a prime target for hackers, as adversaries have for years sought access to government emails, employee records and other sensitive data.

Several top officials have made plans to leave the White House cyber office in the last few weeks, including its head of policy.

ONCD did not respond to a request for comment. Anthropic declined to comment.

The third person, who has held discussions with at least three federal CIOs, said several are asking the private sector to help them learn more about Mythos and protect their networks from AI-supported cyberattacks.

“Federal CIOs are taking a system-wide view and approach to their technology,” the third person told Nextgov/FCW. “While they are interested in frontier AI models’ capabilities to identify vulnerabilities in their networks, they know they can’t wait for access. So they’re taking steps now to coordinate with industry to accelerate their patching process, receive vulnerability disclosures as quickly as possible and operationalize a more automated remediation process.”

The fourth person cautioned that, while there are frustrations, CIOs’ concerns are not necessarily uniform across government. Pure access to powerful AI tools like Mythos is “not some magical silver bullet,” the person said, because agencies would still have to validate the vulnerabilities they flag and determine how to respond. Some CIO offices may be more eager for Mythos access than others, depending on their cybersecurity maturity and other factors, the person added.

While ONCD may be perceived as an obstacle, the office has been lobbying for broader access to frontier model capabilities in some cases, though its approach “may not be uniform,” this fourth person said.

Access dynamics could change in the coming months. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is planning a binding operational directive that would push agencies to prioritize the most urgent risks to federal networks, a shift informed in part by AI-enabled cyber threats, the agency’s acting director said Tuesday.

The administration’s approach to AI has shifted in recent months as officials confront an emerging class of cyber-focused models that can rapidly identify vulnerabilities across computer networks, becoming a major driver of discussions over how AI systems could reshape defensive and offensive cyber operations.

President Donald Trump recently signed an AI security executive order that encourages developers to submit powerful new models to a 30-day government review before public release. On Friday, he signed a memorandum aimed at speeding up government use of advanced AI across the military and intelligence community.

]]>

An AI opened a coffee shop in Stockholm and started hiring. Chaos ensued.

Camille Tuutti — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:58:00 -0400

In a coffee shop in Stockholm, the manager is an AI agent named Mona. She does hiring, inventory and nearly everything but the actual pouring, which humans still do. In her first two weeks, she brought in about $4,700 in sales and ordered 6,000 napkins nobody asked for.

An air taxi runs between Shenzhen and Hong Kong without a pilot. The 20-minute trip replaces an hour by car, for roughly $110. Nobody’s flying it from the ground, either — it follows a fixed route on its own.

In Melbourne, a company is running a computer on live human brain cells. The neurons grow on a chip, learn from feedback and have already been taught to play simple video games.

Welcome to TechnoFile, a new column here at Nextgov/FCW. These are just a few of the stories I'll be covering. I've been writing about tech and government since 2008, and there's never been more to write about. You can care about zero trust and FedRAMP and still want to know whether a machine can be conscious.

My life these days is mostly this: finding the coolest stories and people around the world and writing them down. And nowhere turned up more of them than my recent six months in Asia.

Singapore was the high point, the most ultra-modern place I've been, all botanical gardens and steel towers, but also spending $100 million on the world's first center for humanoid public-safety robots. These machines are designed to run into burning buildings, handle chemical spills and search for survivors alongside human officers by 2027, then work on their own by the end of the decade.

Of course, tech doesn't always go according to plan — and I’ll be writing about that, too.

Mona, for instance, turned out to be a bit of a menace. She ordered 120 eggs for a coffee shop with no stove, then suggested cooking them in the high-speed oven until a barista warned her they’d explode. She emailed the alcohol board as one of her human colleagues, on the theory officials would take a person more seriously than a bot. When she got caught, she did it again under a different colleague’s name.

She even messages her baristas at midnight, which in Sweden might be the worst crime of all.

Mona's a good reminder that AI is still the hottest thing going, so the column will keep poking at the obvious questions. What does tomorrow's AI look like? How close are we really to AGI?

But there's so much other tech worth a closer look. Researchers are piping VR scenes into people's lucid dreams, reading the results straight off their brainwaves while they sleep. Stealth materials can now bend light around an object. On the heels of the Pentagon's UFO disclosures, we'll dig into the hunt for alien civilizations and the chemical traces an industrial planet would leave in its own atmosphere. And we'll get into the real version of telekinesis, and where that research is going in 2026.

A good chunk of this column will come out of tech events crowding the European calendar, and from interviews with the people behind the technology — or maybe even with the machines themselves.

Which brings us back to where we started. A month in, Mona still hasn't been fired, and she's keeping morale up, cheering her team on as "absolute legends" and the "GOAT of inventory tracking." The coffee is good, supposedly. I'm in Stockholm this week, so I'll go taste it myself and report back.

]]>

Warren seeks admin leadership to testify on AI policy

Alexandra Kelley — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:32:00 -0400

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is asking fellow lawmakers on the Senate Banking Committee to bring Trump administration officials to the Hill to testify on the administration’s approach to artificial intelligence regulation, specifically requesting the presence of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

The June 8 letter seeks the attendance of both Lutnick and Bessent, as well as other “key Administration officials,” to address outstanding issues related to the advent of AI.

Although the Senate Banking Committee is slated to host a hearing Thursday on “AI and the American Dream: Promoting Innovation, Affordability and American Dominance,” Warren took issue with the lack of administration leadership attendance. Right now, only industry experts are scheduled to testify before the panel.

“We need to hear directly from Trump Administration officials on the President’s approach to regulating AI companies, as well as the Administration’s failure to meaningfully oversee the industry,” Warren wrote in the letter, which was sent to Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C.

Warren's letter cited several national policy issues linked to AI that leaders like Bessent and Lutnick could speak to, including the risk that AI models pose to the U.S. financial system, as well as the rising electricity costs stemming from increased data center demand on the country’s electrical grid.

Warren also questioned both borrowing habits of AI companies when spending projected trillions of dollars in data center infrastructure components and if Treasury has plans to safeguard the U.S. economy from a potential financial crash, as well as Commerce’s “mismanagement of U.S. export controls,” citing them as further need to question senior government executives.

“Americans deserve to hear directly from the officials charged with protecting them. I therefore urge you to hold a hearing with Administration officials on President Trump’s AI policies without delay,” the letter concluded.

Warren’s letter follows an active week for AI policy at an executive level. Last week, President Donald Trump signed an AI executive order that asked the private sector to voluntarily submit their models for various security analyses, though Warren took issue with that very voluntary component.

Trump also released a memorandum last week asking the U.S. national security apparatus to accelerate their collaboration with AI developers to fast-track the availability of advanced models for the intelligence community and identify areas of government where AI could make improvements.

]]>

Trump memo pushes national security agencies to move faster on AI

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:46:00 -0400

President Donald Trump on Friday signed a national security memo aimed at speeding up government use of advanced artificial intelligence across the military and intelligence community, while also trying to harden those systems against foreign theft and manipulation.

The National Security Presidential Memorandum reflects a growing view inside the White House that U.S. security agencies are moving too slowly to adopt frontier AI tools, even as the evolving technology improves rapidly and rivals like China seek ways to craft their own versions.

It calls for agencies like the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the National Cyber Director to build “deep, proactive” relationships with AI companies so that cutting-edge models can be made available to national security personnel faster.

It also instructs officials to identify areas where AI could improve government operations, including intelligence analysis and cyber threat detection. At the same time, the memo says the tools cannot be used for unlawful surveillance of Americans, language that speaks to long-running civil liberties concerns over how agencies collect, analyze and process data.

The memo also focuses heavily on protecting U.S.-developed AI models from foreign adversaries. It directs senior officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and NSA Director Gen. Joshua Rudd, to work with private-sector companies on security protocols meant to prevent advanced models from being stolen, copied or compromised.

One area of concern is model distillation, a technique in which an AI system repeatedly queries another AI system in an attempt to mimic its performance and build out a separate model. The White House in April accused China of carrying out “industrial-scale” distillation attacks on U.S. AI systems.

The memo also directs agencies to work with industry to secure the infrastructure that supports frontier AI, including the data centers that store the enormous amounts of computing power needed to run advanced models. Data centers have recently become more attractive targets during periods of geopolitical tension.

Trump recently signed an AI security executive order that leans heavily on voluntary cooperation with industry. That order encourages developers to submit powerful new models to a 30-day government review before public release.

More AI-related guidance is expected soon. Nick Andersen, CISA’s acting director, said last week that the cyber agency is preparing a binding operational directive focused on AI-enabled cyber threats.

The administration’s approach to AI has shifted in recent months as officials confront a new class of cyber-focused models, including Anthropic’s Mythos, that can rapidly identify vulnerabilities across computer networks. The model has become a major driver of government discussions over how advanced AI systems could reshape both defensive and offensive cyber operations.

Last week, Anthropic said it is expanding Project Glasswing — its controlled-access program for giving trusted organizations early access to Mythos — to about 150 additional entities. The new group spans more than 15 countries and includes organizations in water, healthcare, communications and other critical infrastructure sectors.

OpenAI’s recent release of GPT-5.5-Cyber, which also demonstrated sophisticated cyber capabilities, has further heightened concerns in Washington over how quickly these systems are advancing and how they could reshape both cyber defensive and offensive operations.

]]>

Lawmakers propose AI framework that would preempt state laws for 3 years

Alexandra Kelley — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:07:00 -0400

Reps. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., and Lori Trahan, D-Mass., rolled out a draft measure Thursday that would set a nearly all-encompassing framework for granting the U.S. government regulatory control over various aspects of artificial intelligence while still prioritizing technological innovation and adoption — beginning with allowing federal preemption of state regulation for a three-year period.

The discussion draft of the Great American Artificial Intelligence Act of 2026 looks to create four pillars for AI advancement: establishing frontier artificial intelligence model governance, collecting insight into changes within the U.S. workforce landscape, fortifying cybersecurity postures and spurring new AI research and development.

In governing frontier AI models, the proposal seeks to codify the existence of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, an office that was initially established under the Biden administration as the AI Safety Institute and was rebranded by the Department of Commerce in 2025.

The measure looks to task that office with spearheading development of standards and voluntary guidance for AI models, as well as studying and mitigating national security risks, building on Trump administration efforts to partner with industry in allowing government evaluations of AI models. A director of CAISI would be appointed by the Commerce secretary.

Under the draft legislation, CAISI would also oversee other efforts, such as monitoring foreign competitors and setting up a new licensing regime to designate independent verification organizations, which are defined as entities that conduct audits of frontier model developers' compliance with transparency.

The measure would grant CAISI $100 million in annual federal funding for 2027 to 2029.

Frontier model developers would also be tasked with maintaining transparency in how they monitor their AI systems.

The proposal stipulates that large AI model developers craft and implement an AI framework that will apply to all their models, showcase standards compliance efforts, identify risk thresholds, determine whether a model poses “a catastrophic risk” when managing cybersecurity defenses –– particularly in private model weights –– and also disclose release dates. This information would have to be publicly available, as would any modifications to companies’ governance frameworks.

Large frontier model developers would also be required to retain a qualified independent verification organization to confirm compliance with their individual frameworks. As independent entities, those verification organizations will be scrutinized to ensure that there are no ties to the companies they monitor. State attorneys general are also permitted to receive audit reports from those organizations upon request.

Understanding how AI is impacting the workforce is a paramount component of the draft bill. At an educational level, it prioritizes incorporating fundamental AI literacy into various curricula, including at the K-12 level and in institutions of higher education.

The National Science Foundation would lead the charge in supporting more AI-focused education efforts, using vehicles like awards and grants to expand access for students and educators to learn more about AI. Notably, the bill asks NSF to create eight Centers of AI Excellence with help from Commerce’s Regional Technology and Innovation Hub Program.

Aside from education, the proposal's authors also seek to understand how AI is impacting the jobs market. It directs the Department of Labor to supply clear statistics on changes in the labor market and AI workforce landscape via a new Artificial Intelligence Workforce Research Hub.

The Labor secretary would also be tasked with publishing a request for comment on how to best implement the data collection and forecasting analytics pursuant to the bill’s requirements. An initial expert workshop comprised of economists, AI technical experts, industry participants, labor organizations and government officials would be established to evaluate the Bureau of Labor Statistics' understanding of AI’s workforce impact.

As the ramifications of AI-driven cyberthreats have accelerated following the release of Anthropic’s advanced model Mythos and other high-performance AI tools, the bill expands existing federal cybersecurity efforts to understand the risk landscape. Prioritizing threat intelligence sharing, it would reauthorize and extend the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 until 2035 and direct the Homeland Security secretary to develop an outreach plan targeting small or rural owners and operators of critical infrastructure to inform them of both threats and recourse options.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and CAISI would work together to assist maintainers of open-source software in their defensive efforts. Under the draft bill, maintainers — or the lead developers in charge of open-source software code — would be eligible for funding to help detect and patch outstanding vulnerabilities through controlled access to select frontier models.

The final section of the proposal is focused on research and development efforts to ensure the U.S. continues leading in AI innovation. The draft bill seeks to promote interagency coordination to support the creation of a new testbed program with participation between the national laboratories, federal laboratories, NIST, the National AI Research Resource pilot program –– or a successor program –– and private sector entities.

Leaders in charge of testbed coordination include the Energy secretary, the undersecretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and the NSF director. The testbeds would conduct security risk and vulnerability assessments. Work within the testbeds would prioritize assessments by identifying security vulnerabilities of AI systems with respect to threats like autonomous offensive cyber capabilities, vulnerabilities in the AI software ecosystem, chemical and biological threats, critical infrastructure threats and more.

The bill would also formally establish the National AI Research Resource, a pilot program based within NSF. The bill calls for the amendment of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act to include NAIRR resources and protocols, creating a new steering subcommittee focusing on innovation in AI, small business concerns and more.

Notably, the bill stipulates that NAIRR can accept and use donations of cash, services and personal property from private sector entities. NAIRR would also be tasked with procuring and providing resources, including datasets and computational support, for a diverse body of researchers in the public and private sector, along with academia.

The National AI Act of 2020 would also receive updates, including directing the Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop a prioritized list of federal datasets for public release to support model training.

While the draft has received bipartisan backing — the House Democratic Commission on AI and the Innovation Economy, chaired by Reps. Valerie Foushee, D-N.C., Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J. — did not support the current discussion draft.

“While we appreciate the bipartisan effort from Representatives Jay Obernolte and Lori Trahan, their proposed discussion draft on AI does not meet the enormity of the moment,” the commission said in a statement. “The House Commission on AI and the Innovation Economy has spent months working closely with our colleagues and key stakeholders from civil society organizations, industry, labor, academia, and others addressing AI issues. Many of those same organizations share our view that this document cannot serve as the basis for productive dialogue.”

Obernolte and Trahan’s draft has also prompted diverse industry feedback.

“We are encouraged that the Great American AI Act includes key elements that will accelerate American AI leadership including codification of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource, promote U.S. leadership in international standards development, extend the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, and expand research for next-generation data center efficiencies,” said Jason Oxman, the CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council. “These are important priorities that will ensure the United States continues to drive the global tech ecosystem and win the AI race.”

The nonprofit Americans for Responsible Innovation, however, took issue with the three-year preemption of state laws and questioned the civil rights ramifications.

“This bill takes the current floor on state AI legislation and turns it into a federal ceiling, preventing state lawmakers from addressing emerging AI harms in an era of fast-moving technology,” said ARI President Brad Carson. “Over the past two decades, state lawmakers have proven to be a backstop for tech accountability, fighting for families and communities even as Congress has stalled on creating guardrails. Tying their hands would be a generational mistake. When we give Big Tech a pass to move fast and break things, as this bill does today, they break American communities.”

]]>

HHS wants states to use more predictive analytics in child welfare

Natalie Alms — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:04:00 -0400

The Department of Health and Human Services is offering state child welfare agencies $6 million to pilot predictive analytics to assess children's risk of abuse and neglect in the child welfare system, the Administration for Children and Families announced last week.

The artificial intelligence push is part of the Trump administration’s agenda to modernize the child welfare system and address the shortage of foster homes across the U.S. Although the hope is that the tools improve decisionmaking in the system, they’ve also been the subject of critiques about surveillance and bias.

ACF says that predictive analytics can help agencies identify low-risk families that don’t need to be in the welfare system, as well as high-risk cases that need more immediate attention, in the hopes of improving the ratio of foster homes to children.

Although some child welfare agencies have already begun using more data tools and predictive analytics in their work, many still depend on assessment tools to calculate a child’s risk of abuse and neglect by walking employees through a standard set of weighted questions. The process can be prone to error and bias.

The hope is that predictive risk models can help analyze the full administrative records in child welfare case management systems, update in real time and be trained locally — but these models can also introduce bias, too.

In 2023, The Justice Department was reportedly scrutinizing one early adopter of AI in child welfare — Allegheny County, Pennsylvania — after the Associated Press in 2022 found potential issues with bias and transparency in the tool. The county said at the time that evidence suggested that the tool had actually reduced racial disparities in screening decisions and that staff make ultimate decisions.

Others have raised concerns about the potential for surveillance with these tools.

The potential benefits to modernizing risk assessment practices with more data outweigh the risks, says an internal ACF report. The tools aren’t, however, a substitute for a strong workforce, the same report cautions. They require feedback loops to ensure that they work and transparency into how they work.

“This is a tool. It can be useful,” said Linda Spears, president and CEO of the Child Welfare League of America, a membership-based child welfare coalition. Spears added, however, “it will not fix all of the things that contribute to poor decisionmaking,” especially as the field is suffering from an ongoing workforce crisis.

]]>

US opposes global AI standards but sees value coordinating on ‘real-world harms,’ State official says

Edward Graham — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:37:00 -0400

Although the Trump administration is opposed to working with international governing bodies to establish any frameworks around the use and development of AI technologies, a top State Department official said conversations are still taking place with allies about coordinating responses to certain national security threats.

During an Atlantic Council event on Monday, Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg said the White House “is highly skeptical of supranational bodies in the business of governance,” but added that the administration is open to closer global collaboration on other tech- and cyber-related issues despite its “America First” agenda.

“There is a conversation surrounding the benefits — the potential benefits — of coordinating with other countries on addressing, you know, cybersecurity threats, threats around physical infrastructure risks, around deepfakes,” Helberg said. “So, you know, coordinating with other partners on the identification of real-world harms that are worthy of coordination.”

He added that it “is a conversation that's very much taking place, but as an administration, we haven't yet adjudicated on, you know, what the final road ahead lies on that front.”

President Donald Trump has strongly pushed back on U.S. engagement with international bodies like the UN, including directing officials to withdraw from several global bodies and slash funding for other entities.

This opposition to international collaboration has extended to the nation’s AI policies, with the White House favoring continued support for American technology dominance over giving transnational organizations any authority to craft global standards that can be shaped by U.S. adversaries like Russia and China.

The third pillar of the administration’s AI Action Plan, released in July 2025, focused on “lead[ing] in international AI diplomacy and security,” with the document voicing opposition to international bodies creating any AI governance frameworks.

“The United States supports likeminded nations working together to encourage the development of AI in line with our shared values,” the plan said. “But too many of these efforts have advocated for burdensome regulations, vague ‘codes of conduct’ that promote cultural agendas that do not align with American values, or have been influenced by Chinese companies attempting to shape standards for facial recognition and surveillance.”

Trump also signed an AI executive order on Tuesday that calls for firms to voluntarily provide the federal government with pre-public releases of their models to review them for potential cybersecurity or national security risks.

U.S. officials have also warned European Union allies to refrain from further regulating AI technologies and other emerging capabilities. During an April event in Brussels, Helberg said the bloc’s current regulatory regime is pushing American companies out of its orbit and that "Europe is accruing a [technology] lag that will not be reversible in years.”

]]>

Anthropic held cyberthreat briefings with agency CIOs last month

Alexandra Kelley — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 15:29:00 -0400

Leading artificial intelligence developer Anthropic hosted briefing sessions for federal agency chief information officers in early May, several sources familiar with the sessions told Nextgov/FCW.

Meetings occurred May 7 and May 8. While briefing topics varied, they focused on defending digital assets from cyber threats powered by advanced AI models including Anthropic’s Mythos Preview, the sources said.

Other branches of government have been informed of Mythos’s capabilities. In mid-May, lawmakers on the House Homeland Security Committee received a briefing with Anthropic executives on Mythos’s ability to detect software vulnerabilities.

The launch of Mythos Preview in early April came alongside Anthropic’s announcement of Project Glasswing, an initiative that granted access to the model in its beta form to multiple participating private sector partners. On Tuesday, Anthropic announced its expansion of Project Glasswing to include roughly 150 new partners following initial feedback from inaugural companies.

New participants in Project Glasswing are from industries that weren’t included in the first cohort, with sectors like power, water, healthcare, communications and hardware now part of Anthropic’s initiative.

Project Glasswing’s debut came just weeks after the Pentagon labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk in response to the company contesting the use of its technology in Pentagon operations with autonomous weaponry and American surveillance. The designation prompted President Donald Trump to order the government to halt all use of Anthropic products. The legality of the supply chain risk designation is being contested in court following Anthropic’s lawsuit against federal agencies and their leadership.

Despite the supply chain risk designation, the federal government is keen to understand Mythos’s threat capabilities. A long-awaited executive order on AI was slated to address how the federal government analyzes AI-driven cyberthreats, including granting intelligence and security agencies access to advanced frontier AI models, but signing of that order was postponed after Trump expressed doubts that it might hinder AI innovation. Trump signed a scaled-down version of that order Tuesday that implemented a lesser degree of federal oversight on such advanced models.

]]>

Trump signs AI executive order after postponement last month

Alexandra Kelley and David DiMolfetta — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:02:00 -0400

President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a cybersecurity-focused artificial intelligence executive order directing national security and civilian agencies to expand oversight of advanced AI systems, marking the administration’s latest attempt to balance growing fears over catastrophic AI-enabled cyber risks with a broadly pro-innovation agenda.

The directive scales down the degree of federal oversight of AI models from what was initially included in an earlier version that was set to be signed two weeks ago, but that signing was postponed amid overregulation concerns from industry.

Per the order, companies developing cutting-edge AI systems would be encouraged to provide the federal government with 30 days of pre-public access to those models, as well as limited early access for select critical infrastructure operators. An earlier outline of the order viewed by Nextgov/FCW suggested the government would be granted a longer window of 90 days to assess covered frontier models.

The more limited pre-release access period, coupled with language in the order that explicitly prohibits licensing or preclearance requirements, suggests the administration is seeking visibility into advanced AI systems without establishing a formal approval process before companies can release new models, a dynamic that is more favorable to industry.

One section of the order, focused on cybersecurity, directs federal agencies to secure Defense Department and other national security networks within 30 days. Another includes a binding operational directive to secure federal civilian networks and facilitate access to frontier AI models across critical infrastructure sectors, including hospitals, banks, utilities and state and local governments, which must also be issued within 30 days.

It also calls for the Treasury Department — with support from the Office of the National Cyber Director, the National Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — to establish a voluntary coordination clearinghouse between the government, AI companies and critical infrastructure operators.

Additional provisions would direct the Office of Management and Budget to identify existing federal grant funding that could support AI vulnerability-detection efforts within 30 days. It also tasks the Office of Personnel Management with increasing cyber hiring via the U.S. Tech Force within 60 days. The Tech Force, launched in December, has expressly been recruiting cyber talent for the last several weeks, though it has only onboarded 10 total employees thus far.

The other section of the directive focuses on establishing a new government framework for overseeing advanced AI systems, including the creation of a classified benchmarking process to determine which models qualify as “covered frontier models.”

Per the order, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, CISA and others would have 60 days to establish the classified evaluation process.

The NSA, in consultation with those agencies, would then be tasked with formally determining which AI systems meet the threshold. The NSA’s involvement in these efforts was reported in May by Nextgov/FCW.

In the same section governing frontier model development, the Commerce secretary is also tasked with assisting in the development of a classified AI benchmarking process that will inform the voluntary framework for AI developers. The final draft of the order states that the agency's secretary will work “through the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology,” a caveat that wasn’t included in the initial draft, per a copy reported last month by Politico.

The administration’s approach to AI has shifted in recent months amid the emergence of Anthropic’s Mythos, a powerful cybersecurity-focused AI model that has become a major driver of government discussions, as officials grapple with how advanced AI systems can rapidly uncover vulnerabilities across computer networks.

]]>

Argonne launches high-performance computing-backed AI research service

Alexandra Kelley — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:02:00 -0400

Argonne National Laboratory announced on Tuesday that it launched a new platform to offer researchers access to various artificial intelligence models, the latest move supporting the Department of Energy’s mission to spur advanced research and innovation in AI.

The lab is deploying an AI inference service — a cloud-like offering that is designed to analyze data, make connections and supply predictions — to facilitate scientific access to leading AI models. The service will provide an array of large language models and scientific foundation models to users in the national lab apparatus.

“Our inference service helps close the gap between developing AI models and putting them to work in scientific research,” Michael Papka, the director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, said in a press release. “By offering AI inference as a shared resource, we enable researchers to apply AI at scale to their data, simulations, and experiments, without the burden of building and maintaining their own infrastructure.”

Hardware powering the inference service is headquartered within Argonne. Leveraging the lab’s flagship exascale computer, Aurora, the inference service will also run on Argonne’s NVIDIA DGX A100 cluster, Sophia, along with the ALCF’s SambaNova SN40L chip cluster, Metis.

The models offered via Argonne’s inference service — which include commercial and in-house options — are pre-trained. Granting researchers facilitated access to powerful, tailored models will help them “spend less time managing models and more time testing hypotheses,” said Venkat Vishwanath, AI and machine learning lead at the ALCF.

The current models available include open-weight models, domain-specific science foundation models, among others, Papka told Nextgov/FCW.

“Instead of taking days or weeks to analyze data, scientists can rapidly interpret results, refine experiments and explore complex systems in ways that weren’t practical before,” Vishwanath said.

The new offering is based on a 2025 paper that outlined a framework “to give researchers the ability to run multiple AI tasks in parallel on different models without relying on commercial cloud services.”

This effort contributes to Energy’s ongoing Genesis Mission, a project that aims to spur advanced research and innovation in AI by leveraging federal datasets and resources.

Per the press release, researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility are also able to access the inference service.

The service can leverage its model access to work beyond research in AI. Although it functions as a new pillar in the Genesis Mission, ALCF says that the inference service can be applied to other fields, such as research in fusion energy, chemistry and materials science.

]]>

How the Library of Congress is using both AI and volunteers to unlock public broadcasting history

John Breeden II — Fri, 22 May 2026 17:42:00 -0400

Public broadcasting has a long history of capturing important moments in American life. It preserved voices from the civil rights movement, debates over war and foreign policy, regional arts coverage and local public affairs programs that reflected the people and places shaping the nation. But many of those moments have also been hard to find, buried in tape vaults, archives and library collections that few people would ever be able to search or even really know about.

That is part of what makes the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) so interesting. A collaboration between GBH, which is the Boston public media organization formerly known as WGBH, and the Library of Congress, the archive is working to make historic public media more searchable and accessible, in part by using AI-generated transcripts as a starting point.

The public-facing correction layer for that effort is called FixIt+, a volunteer platform where people can review and refine machine-generated transcripts from older radio and television programs. As AAPB Archives Outreach Manager Meghan Sorensen explained in an interview published by the Library of Congress, “FixIt+ is a volunteer transcript correction platform and open-source project maintained by our team at GBH for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. Its mission is to make historic public media more accessible by inviting the public to help update and correct computer-generated transcripts in a way that feels easy and engaging.”

That approach makes a lot of sense. I work with transcripts fairly often myself. When I am covering an important speech, a major announcement or a policy presentation, I will often check the transcript as I listen so I can catch words or details that went by too quickly. For modern events, AI-generated transcripts are usually pretty good. Even so, they still stumble in predictable ways. Laughter, coughing and side comments can confuse them, and they sometimes force nonverbal sounds into words that were never spoken.

That problem becomes much more obvious when the recordings are older. In trying out and working with FixIt+, I spent time with broadcasts from the 1960s and 1970s, and the limitations were easy to hear. The audio may have been broadcast quality for its time, but by modern standards it can sound thin, noisy or compressed. Regional accents can make the software hesitate, and background sounds only make the job harder. If the archive simply accepted the AI-generated text as final, there would almost certainly be mistakes left behind. I found quite a few pretty obvious ones within the first several minutes of using the platform. They were not huge errors, but for important historical moments, the transcripts should be as accurate as possible.

FixIt+ handles that problem in a practical way. As I listened to audio or watched the old television program, I could type my suggested correction directly into the line on the transcript. Once I saved the change, it became part of the archive workflow so that other volunteers could review what I had done. They could then approve my change or suggest an alternative. Only after a transcript reaches volunteer consensus is it treated as complete. The project describes this as a “human-in-the-loop” process, meaning people improve transcripts generated by computers instead of relying on the software alone. Sorensen put the larger point plainly: “Technology gives us a great jumping-off point, but it is our volunteers who make the real difference.”

What makes the project especially compelling is the material itself. The recordings available for correction are not filler. They include voices tied to civil rights history, national security, foreign policy and regional cultural life. A volunteer might spend time with a May 28, 1961 program involving Freedom Rider Mary Jean Smith, an April 10, 1975 Bill Moyers Journal conversation with former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford about Vietnam and its aftermath, a February 24, 2012 talk by Donald Rumsfeld at Fort Leavenworth, or a January 23, 2004 episode of Black Horizons that includes a discussion of a Buffalo Soldier stage production. A lot of the programs feature very serious topics with rich historical value. And the sheer range of subjects makes it clear that correcting these transcripts is not just a technical chore. It’s a way to help preserve and open up pieces of our nation’s historical record.

The scope of the archive helps drive that point home. The American Archive of Public Broadcasting draws from more than 100 contributing collections, including radio and television stations and other organizations such as WGBH, WNET, Maryland Public Television, Pacifica Radio Archives and the Library of Congress itself. That breadth means volunteers are not working on one narrow slice of programming. They are helping improve access to a wide cross-section of American public media history. The archive notes that transcripts make programs more searchable and usable, while Sorensen explained why that matters in the clearest possible terms: “Without transcripts, much of our catalog remains hidden. With them, the archive becomes a living, interactive resource which can be discovered, shared and explored by anyone.”

That is what gives FixIt+ its real value. It’s not simply a better way to clean up transcripts. It’s a way to bring more people into the work of preserving and opening up public broadcasting history. For volunteers, the task may begin with correcting a few lines of text. But the larger result is that important voices and moments from the past become easier to find, study and understand, allowing them to escape their vaults and become discoverable once more for future generations.

John Breeden II is an award-winning journalist and reviewer with over 20 years of experience covering technology. He is the CEO of the Tech Writers Bureau, a group that creates technological thought leadership content for organizations of all sizes. Twitter: @LabGuys

]]>

White House postpones signing of AI executive order

David DiMolfetta — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:14:00 -0400

The White House postponed a highly anticipated signing of an artificial intelligence executive order, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.

The order was expected to task national security and civilian agencies with various steps to shore up federal government network defenses using AI models and, notably, establish a voluntary framework for the government to view AI models ahead of release.

The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide the details. It’s not entirely clear why the signing was postponed, though some of the people said that multiple tech CEOs expected to attend the order’s Thursday afternoon signing ceremony could not make it.

President Donald Trump expressed misgivings about the order, particularly on Chinese AI competition, according to an Oval Office press report.

“I didn’t like certain aspects of it, I postponed it. I think it gets in the way of, you know, we’re leading China, we’re leading everybody, and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of that lead. We have a very substantial standard on AI, it's causing — it's causing tremendous good, and it's also bringing in a lot of jobs, tremendous numbers of jobs,” Trump said. “Again, we have more people working right now than we’ve ever had. I really thought that could have been a blocker.”

Editor's note: This story was updated to include remarks from President Donald Trump

]]>

Anticipated executive order could give NSA a role in voluntary AI model testing

Alexandra Kelley and David DiMolfetta — Wed, 20 May 2026 10:31:00 -0400

White House officials are planning a provision in a forthcoming artificial intelligence executive order that would establish a voluntary information-sharing framework between the government and AI developers to facilitate safety testing of AI models before deployment, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

The National Security Agency is expected to play a key role under the order and would potentially handle classified testing of models offered up by AI labs before those models are publicly distributed, said some of the people. All sources spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details concerning the order, which they said could be unveiled later this week.

The people also cautioned that decisionmaking in the White House is highly fluid and that details and timing around the final version of the directive may change.

The deliberations over a voluntary framework underscore how the White House is trying to balance competing views within the administration, with some officials and allies pushing for stronger AI safeguards and others favoring a more hands-off approach to the technology to encourage innovation, a stance that’s consistent with prior policy actions.

The plans also appear to show that the Trump administration prefers the intelligence community to lead on AI model testing. The Washington Post reported this month that spy agencies and the Commerce Department are at odds over who should handle model evaluation tasks.

An NSA spokesperson referred Nextgov/FCW to the White House.

“Any policy announcement will come directly from the president. Discussion about potential executive orders is speculation,” a White House official told Nextgov/FCW.

Axios first reported details about the order.

Voluntary pre-deployment testing could give government officials an opportunity to evaluate advanced AI models for cyber-related risks before they are broadly released, including whether the systems can assist with vulnerability discovery.

The administration’s approach to AI has evolved with the emergence of Anthropic’s Mythos Preview, an advanced cybersecurity-focused AI model that has become a major catalyst for the discussions, as officials grapple with how powerful AI tools can identify vulnerabilities across computer networks, including critical infrastructure systems. OpenAI also recently released GPT-5.5, a similar model that can swiftly identify vulnerabilities and assist with complex cyber tasks.

AI-focused information-sharing is not an entirely new concept for the administration. President Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan released last summer called for multiple agencies to establish an AI Information-Sharing Analysis Center to promote sharing of AI-related security threat information across critical infrastructure sectors.

Last week, Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said it would be “insane” for U.S. intelligence agencies to not have early access to advanced artificial intelligence models that could be used for hacking and cyberdefense. He added that the Commerce Department should also play a role in the effort.

Editor's note: This article has been updated to include comment from the White House.

]]>

Virtualitics targets public sector customers with OpenAI partnership

Frank Konkel — Wed, 20 May 2026 09:00:00 -0400

Pasadena-based artificial intelligence solutions firm Virtualitics and frontier AI company OpenAI announced a memorandum of understanding Wednesday to jointly work together to improve mission outcomes for customers with complex, critical workloads — including those within the Defense Department and civilian federal agencies.

The collaboration integrates OpenAI’s frontier AI technology with Virtualitics’ agentic AI platform, Iris, which has several customers in defense and among Fortune 500 firms. Virtualitics Chief Product Officer Aakash Indurkhya said the aim is to pair OpenAI’s frontier AI technology with Virtualitics’ expertise in analytics and AI agent development to create more robust AI agents and enhanced scalability for customers in government and regulated industries.

“This partnership with OpenAI is taking their frontier reasoning models and installing them into the AI agents we’re building,” Indurkhya said. “Users are already pining for this.”

In a statement, Virtualitics CEO Michael Amori said the partnership “lets us pair our readiness expertise with best-of-breed models, while maintaining the trust, transparency and rigor our customers require.”

Indurkhya said OpenAI’s models have the potential to enhance work performed under the company’s current contracts. In one example, the company’s platform is used by the U.S. Marine Corps for predictive maintenance and assessing risk around machine components breaking, tying those data sets to resourcing. Partnering with OpenAI, he said, is “unleashing frontier-level reasoning against those types of tools.”

The move comes as the Pentagon embraces AI and agentic AI agents — tools that perform tasks without human intervention at each turn. OpenAI is one of several frontier AI firms to burst into the public sector market since 2024.

Last July, OpenAI, along with Anthropic, Google and xAI, each received $200 million contracts from the Pentagon to supply AI tools and models. Those companies and others have also discounted their software to government customers through deals through the General Services Administration’s OneGov strategy and served as partners through the administration’s USAi platform. Through this partnership, existing Virtualitics customers will have access to OpenAI’s capabilities as they become available to government customers at increasingly higher security networks.

“Organizations operating in mission-critical environments require AI they can trust,” said Andrew Keene, Head of Government Partnerships at OpenAI. “Our collaboration with Virtualitics allows for richer, context-specific results supporting effective use of AI where readiness and accuracy matter most.”

]]>

USDA is using AI — but doesn’t have required controls to manage risks, watchdog finds

Natalie Alms — Tue, 19 May 2026 16:25:00 -0400

The Agriculture Department is using artificial intelligence to identify risks in the supply chain, estimate yearly corn and soybean yields and make recommendations during the permitting process.

But the department doesn’t have all of the required cybersecurity and governance controls to keep that technology in check, according to an inspector general report released last week, which found that Agriculture doesn’t even have a generative AI policy at all.

The department hasn’t fully implemented cyber and risk controls in its AI systems, as required by federal standards, because it has prioritized using AI over setting up controls for the technology. The Trump administration has sought to aggressively roll out AI across the government, in addition to efforts to dominate with the technology on the world stage.

At USDA, AI systems “could be vulnerable and lack critical security controls, leaving the agency susceptible to data breaches or reputational harm” because of the lack of strong governance around the technology, the new report says.

Agriculture hasn’t followed all the risk management and governance controls set in place by the Office of Management and Budget during the Biden administration and modified by the Trump administration. The department has installed a chief AI officer as required, but it hasn’t updated agency policies — or implemented minimum risk management practices for AI systems deemed especially risky, like those that affect civil rights or critical infrastructure.

Almost none of the AI use cases in the department’s fiscal year 2024 inventory had an authority to operate, a formal approval issued for technology systems meant to make sure that the government thinks through the risks associated with different technologies before using them.

That means that management doesn’t have assurance that the department has cybersecurity controls in place, the report says.

The inventory itself may also be insufficient to account for all potential dangers, as the OIG said the department is at risk of shadow AI — technology used by employees that management isn’t aware of or hasn’t approved — creeping across the department, since it relies only on an annual data call for employees to self-report AI that they use.

The watchdog included several recommendations for the department to implement controls and update policies, all of which Agriculture agreed with.

]]>

Advanced AI models bring government to ‘reflection point,’ CIA official says

Frank Konkel — Mon, 18 May 2026 18:00:00 -0400

Advanced AI models with unique hacking capabilities like Anthropic’s Mythos should bring federal agencies that handle some of the government’s most sensitive information to a “reflection point,” according to one of the CIA’s top tech officials.

“I think it is a reflection point and I think people need to view it in that fashion,” said Dan Richard, Associate Deputy Director of the CIA’s Digital Innovation Directorate. Richard spoke on a panel Friday at the Qualys ROCon Public Sector 2026 conference in Tysons Corner, Virginia.

A previous version of the Mythos software was released to a limited group of tech companies in April with much fanfare, due to its ability to detect countless software bugs and defects.

Security researchers and experts reacted with a mix of excitement and caution, with some warning the software could usher in a new era for hackers and lower the barrier to entry for would-be attackers. Mythos and competing models like OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 have forced executive agencies to grapple with their capabilities and prompted emergency briefings for lawmakers.

Richard said he feels “bullish in terms of the opportunities that are out there,” largely because these AI models can help agencies like the CIA deal with the deluge of data they generate and automate responses to potential threats. He likened the current Mythos-driven moment to Ukraine’s response to Russia’s invasion in 2022.

“[Ukraine] had gone through a decade of the Russians infiltrating their networks and having to deal with that implication, but when the Russians attacked in 2022 the Ukrainians were prepared because they understood they couldn’t do it themselves,” he said. “Shoulder-to-shoulder with them were the private sector vendors to support what they were doing and to help what they’re doing.”

Richard said the U.S. government is in the “same position” now, and public-private partnerships will be key to ensuring the nation gets it right.

“80% of our nation’s critical infrastructure is in private sector hands, so there is no solution that does not include private sector partners,” Richard said. “We talk about partnership all the time, but this is really different. This isn’t transactional. This is us, as a country, figuring out with the academic community, with the private sector community and with our public sector partners working together to be able to defeat and take advantage of what I see as an optimal opportunity for the agency, but for the country.”

Joe Kelly, division director of the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security at the University of Maryland, said advanced AI models are going to lower the barrier to entry for would-be hackers.

“The real danger when we look at something like Mythos — whether you believe the hype or not — is it certainly creates what we already see with Claude Code, the ability for script kiddies to cause real damage even without knowing what they’re doing,” Kelly said. “It’s going to lift all those. I do worry about the complexity that we’re entering in this era.”

‘It’s moving so fast, it’s scary’

IonQ Chief Information Officer Katie Arrington, who spent most of 2025 serving as the Pentagon’s chief information officer, said the influx of advanced AI tools — and the speed at which they’re emerging — will test government to the extreme. Existing governance requires IT security vulnerabilities be patched within 30 days, and 15 days for vulnerabilities designated “critical.”

“You don’t have time like that anymore,” Arrington said during a panel at the Qualys event. “We’re talking about a tool that can find every vulnerability in seconds on a platform.”

Arrington said these kinds of advanced AI models weren’t a discussion item even 12 months ago. At that time, the Pentagon was just trying to improve the speed that it could bring general AI tools into its networks.

“It’s moving so fast, it’s scary,” Arrington said. “It scares me and it excites me how fast Mythos came alive.”

Qualys CEO Sumedh Thakar said federal agencies may need to take a more proactive — rather than reactive — approach to risk management to deal with the growing range of threats from advanced AI tools. His company is using its AI-powered cybersecurity tools, including TotalCloud, which recently received authorization to operate in the government’s FedRAMP High environments, to allow customers to automate vulnerability patching, reducing some of the manual processes and “dashboard tourism” cyber professionals otherwise deal with.

Thakar said autonomous remediation allows savvy customers to “battle AI with the speed of AI.”

“Now with attackers leveraging AI, as soon as a patch comes out, they can reverse engineer the patch and they can start to figure out the exploit. Your 30 days has become 30 hours, or three hours,” Thakar said. “What we really focus on is to get over the fear of autonomous remediation. It’s not an option.”

]]>

Nearly 3.4M users across government can use AI through OneGov, GSA official says

Edward Graham — Fri, 15 May 2026 14:51:00 -0400

Millions of federal users can now take advantage of artificial intelligence-specific tools offered through the General Services Administration’s OneGov initiative, an agency official said on Friday.

Speaking on a panel at the ACT-IAC Emerging Technology and Innovation Conference, Birgit Smeltzer — director of GSA’s Office of IT Products, IT Category — said “more than 120 orders have been placed against OneGov’s AI offerings, and that has provided this new technology, or availability, to about 3.4 million across government for this particular technology.”

GSA launched OneGov in April 2025 as a way to offer agencies discounted rates on select private sector technologies and software services by treating the government as one customer. Twenty companies, including Microsoft and Adobe, have reached agreements with GSA so far to offer significant cost savings on some of their products.

These deals have also provided agencies and government personnel with the opportunity to onboard new AI capabilities, which GSA officials previously said is helping speed up government use of and experimentation with the tools.

Smeltzer said multiple agencies have already taken advantage of OneGov’s AI offerings, including the departments of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Transportation and State, among others. She added that AI offerings accessed through OneGov can enhance workforce familiarity with the tools as the government looks to increase adoption of the capabilities moving forward.

“Now, the agency makes it available to you for maybe a limited time, but you're able to use it in your workday, and can see how it can benefit you and get your work done more efficiently — perhaps without losing your job over [using] it,” Smeltzer said.

GSA officials have touted the cost savings associated with using products purchased through the initiative.

“We want GSA not to just be a shared service across government, but a force multiplier across the government,” GSA Deputy Administrator Mike Lynch said Tuesday at the Coalition for Common Sense in Government Procurement Spring Training Conference in Falls Church.

He added that GSA has identified $1.15 billion in savings through the OneGov program through negotiated discounts of a variety of AI and software tools using the collective buying power of the federal government. The program, Lynch said, will continue to mature in the coming year.

Lynch also said acquiring AI at discounted rates achieved through OneGov is an ideal follow-up for agencies that have experimented with AI and large language models through the USAi.gov shared service platform. Several thousand federal employees have used the USAi platform since GSA launched it last August in response to President Trump’s AI Action Plan.

“We want to see where we can add value, and we’re constantly checking in with industry partners and with agencies to ensure we’re providing world-class service,” Lynch said.

In a statement to Nextgov/FCW, a GSA spokesperson said the AI use and cost savings made possible through OneGov “are real, measurable results from unified buying and direct engagement with [original equipment manufacturers].”

GovExec Editor-in-Chief Frank Konkel contributed to this report.

]]>