Governor Gavin Newsom announced on June 29 that California has signed a partnership with Anthropic to put Claude — Anthropic’s AI assistant — at the disposal of every state agency and every city and county that chooses to participate, at a 50% discount from the standard price.
What the deal includes
Access flows through the California Department of Technology’s Statewide Information Technology Shared Services (SITeS) portal, which functions as a single vetted procurement route for all state and local agencies. Alongside the discounted pricing, Anthropic is providing free workforce training and technical assistance to help employees integrate Claude into government workflows.
Work already under way
Several California agencies had already begun using Claude before the agreement was formalized. The state DMV deployed it to reduce customer wait times; Medicaid teams are using Claude to automate case workflows; and the state’s cyber unit is applying it to code scanning and threat response. The Poppy tool — a library of pre-built AI queries for state workers — was also built using Claude.
What officials said
“AI should not replace the human work of government; it should help our workers move faster, solve problems more effectively, and deliver better results for Californians,” Newsom said in the announcement.
The agreement builds on executive order N-5-26, which Newsom signed on March 30, 2026, setting procurement standards and safeguards that AI vendors must meet to do business with California.
Why it matters
California’s roughly 300,000 state workers and the agencies of the most populous US state now have a single, approved route to AI adoption under negotiated terms. According to the announcement, this is the first time a single AI productivity tool has been cleared for statewide procurement across all California agencies — a model that other states may look to replicate.