ChatGPT at half price for US government agencies

What's new

The US procurement agency GSA has signed an expanded agreement with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. The deal was announced on September 10, 2026, and is part of the OneGov program. It gives public agencies discounted access to the ChatGPT models, and they pay based on usage.

The discount is 50 percent on token-based usage. Tokens are the small chunks of text that AI models read and write in, and they are what the bill is normally based on. There are no platform fees, no minimum orders and no commitment to a particular level of usage. The agreement takes effect on October 1, 2026.

Access applies to federal agencies in all three branches (executive, legislative and judicial) as well as state, local and tribal governments.

What's smart

The smart part is the simple model. Agencies pay only for actual use, so they can try out AI without committing to large sums up front. The price is also locked in for 27 months, which makes budgets easier to plan.

Access can be bought directly, through resellers and through supported cloud marketplaces. It includes FedRAMP-authorized environments, which are the US security requirements for cloud services in government, and training materials are included.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, says: "Giving public servants secure access to the best AI tools can help government be more efficient."

Cheaper or better?

It is cheaper, but only for the covered public-sector customers: half price on usage compared with standard pricing. The deal does not make the models themselves any better. Specific list prices are not given in the sources, so the exact savings in dollars cannot be calculated.

For comparison, the outlet 36Kr writes that China's DeepSeek keeps its API prices at roughly one-tenth of OpenAI's. DeepSeek released V4 in April 2026 with a context window of one million tokens, meaning room for a lot of text at once, and up to 384,000 tokens of output. Competitor Kimi has released K2.6, which according to the article scores 58.6 percent on the SWE-Bench Pro test for parallel programming. According to 36Kr, DeepSeek has 127 million monthly users versus Kimi's 9 million. The figures date from May 2026 and are the outlet's own claims.

According to GSA, OneGov has saved roughly $1.68 billion since its launch, and AI agreements have given access to roughly 3.5 million federal employees.

What it's good for

The agreement is aimed at public-sector work in the US, such as case processing, writing tasks and analysis, where many employees need to get started without large startup costs. The usage-based model suits departments that want to test first and then scale up.

For Danish readers, the most important takeaway is the direction of pricing: major AI companies are ready to give big discounts to public-sector customers. The agreement applies to US government agencies. The sources do not say whether anything similar is offered in Denmark or the EU, or what private users pay per month.