There you have it! The government's $1 AI deals expire September 30, and GSA still hasn't said wh…
August 16, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 comments
Cybersecurity Workforce AI
There you have it! The government's $1 AI deals expire September 30, and GSA still hasn't said what replaces them.
Full breakdown on UnbiasedHeadlines.com — we built it to give you the facts without the spin: https://lnkd.in/gAMexhyq
Fun fact before I get into it: this is the first time I've ever been quoted in a story on my own news media company. My AI newsroom pulled the reporting, found the record, and quoted me back to myself without being told to. Reading your own year-old warning come back at you through a machine you built is a genuinely strange feeling. But the quote is real, and so is the warning.
Under GSA's OneGov strategy, agencies bought ChatGPT Enterprise for $1 a year, Claude for $1, and Gemini for 47 cents. Roughly 3.4 million federal users. More than 120 orders placed. GSA is bragging about $1.6 billion in savings.
In six weeks, all three expire. No public renewal price. No exit path. Just a habit that 3.4 million people now depend on — and a bill that lands the day the discount does.
A George Washington law professor already named it: Twenty-Five Cent AI. The nominal price is the trap. You buy in at a dollar, you get hooked at scale, and the real cost — lifecycle, dependency, lost leverage — shows up after you can't walk away.
I know how this ends because I said so a year ago. And I didn't just post about it.
Back in August 2025, I took it to the Government Accountability Office. I filed formal protests against all three deals and put the case on the record: they violated commercial pricing rules, circumvented competition, ran through a reseller instead of the actual model makers, and lacked the security authorizations the government requires. I warned — a year ago, on paper, in front of a federal watchdog — that a $1 price tag buys you a chat window, not the model access agencies need to build anything real.
That was my fight, in the role I held at the time.
In December, GAO dismissed the protests without ruling on a single word of it. Not because the argument was wrong. Because they decided the challenger wasn't an interested party and called the whole thing a paperwork modification outside their authority. A procedural door slammed shut. The merits were never touched.
So here we are. Exactly where I said we'd be.
The discounts already spent the government's negotiating leverage. The vendors will price the renewals off a year of usage data they now hold over you. And when the sanctioned tools get too expensive, the workflows don't disappear — the people just keep using AI off the books, unlogged, unsecured.
This wasn't a hard call. It was a $1 loss-leader anyone who's negotiated a federal contract could see coming a mile away.
And now the warfighters and the taxpayers pay for it. Again.
You've been warned. A year ago, actually.
Full breakdown on UnbiasedHeadlines.com — we built it to give you the facts without the spin: https://lnkd.in/gAMexhyq
Fun fact before I get into it: this is the first time I've ever been quoted in a story on my own news media company. My AI newsroom pulled the reporting, found the record, and quoted me back to myself without being told to. Reading your own year-old warning come back at you through a machine you built is a genuinely strange feeling. But the quote is real, and so is the warning.
Under GSA's OneGov strategy, agencies bought ChatGPT Enterprise for $1 a year, Claude for $1, and Gemini for 47 cents. Roughly 3.4 million federal users. More than 120 orders placed. GSA is bragging about $1.6 billion in savings.
In six weeks, all three expire. No public renewal price. No exit path. Just a habit that 3.4 million people now depend on — and a bill that lands the day the discount does.
A George Washington law professor already named it: Twenty-Five Cent AI. The nominal price is the trap. You buy in at a dollar, you get hooked at scale, and the real cost — lifecycle, dependency, lost leverage — shows up after you can't walk away.
I know how this ends because I said so a year ago. And I didn't just post about it.
Back in August 2025, I took it to the Government Accountability Office. I filed formal protests against all three deals and put the case on the record: they violated commercial pricing rules, circumvented competition, ran through a reseller instead of the actual model makers, and lacked the security authorizations the government requires. I warned — a year ago, on paper, in front of a federal watchdog — that a $1 price tag buys you a chat window, not the model access agencies need to build anything real.
That was my fight, in the role I held at the time.
In December, GAO dismissed the protests without ruling on a single word of it. Not because the argument was wrong. Because they decided the challenger wasn't an interested party and called the whole thing a paperwork modification outside their authority. A procedural door slammed shut. The merits were never touched.
So here we are. Exactly where I said we'd be.
The discounts already spent the government's negotiating leverage. The vendors will price the renewals off a year of usage data they now hold over you. And when the sanctioned tools get too expensive, the workflows don't disappear — the people just keep using AI off the books, unlogged, unsecured.
This wasn't a hard call. It was a $1 loss-leader anyone who's negotiated a federal contract could see coming a mile away.
And now the warfighters and the taxpayers pay for it. Again.
You've been warned. A year ago, actually.