HHS proposes interim Anthropic award to keep Claude running without open competition

HHS wants to keep its existing Claude services running without first choosing a vendor through open competition. The department disclosed plans for a limited interim award to Anthropic while it prepares a broader competitive purchase of enterprise AI services—a decision that has drawn a procurement expert’s warning about dependence on one supplier.

In an October 19 notice on SAM.gov, the Department of Health and Human Services outlined its intent to make a sole-source award, meaning an award without an open competition. FedScoop reported the plan on October 20. The notice describes an intended purchase, not a completed contract award.

HHS says Claude alone can meet its stated needs. Those needs include chat, drafting, summarization, data-analysis workflows, application access and administrative controls. But the agency’s justification is not simply a claim that Claude performs those tasks better than competing tools. It defines the requirement around maintaining the Claude deployment already in place.

That reasoning drew criticism from Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for Government Procurement Law Studies at George Washington University. She told FedScoop the notice appears to acknowledge that HHS is dependent on Claude. Her concern is vendor lock-in: an agency becoming tied to a supplier because moving away is difficult or expensive.

Tillipman also questioned the fit between the listed services and the sole-source justification. She described the notice as outlining fairly general chatbot services. In her assessment, the inconvenience of switching providers is not a normal justification for avoiding competition. If switching is too painful or costly, she said, that suggests the agency negotiated poorly despite warnings about dependency.

The continuity request follows an agency-wide rollout less than a year ago. HHS made Claude available to its workforce in December 2025, after Anthropic offered its services to government agencies for $1 a year. The department also listed Claude use cases in its AI inventory for 2025.

Anthropic’s discounted government agreement through the General Services Administration’s OneGov initiative is scheduled to end on October 31, 2026. That deadline is itself an extension of the original deal. The proposed award therefore arrives as the discounted arrangement approaches its end, although the precise agreements HHS would continue remain unclear.

HHS describes the Anthropic award as a bridge while it prepares a competitive enterprise AI procurement. Its stated destination is a multiple-award blanket purchase agreement—a purchasing arrangement involving more than one supplier. The notice names it the HHS Enterprise Frontier SI Models and Advanced Features multiple-award BPA.

Whether that competition is already active was unclear at the time of FedScoop’s report. FedScoop did not specify the proposed interim award’s value or exact scope. Neither HHS nor Anthropic responded to its inquiries.