HHS to make sole-source award to Anthropic ahead of broader AI competition

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said it plans to give Anthropic a contract for its Claude services without asking other companies to compete. This temporary contract would help keep the services running while HHS prepares for a wider competition.

In a notice posted on Monday on SAM.gov, HHS said it plans to give Anthropic a contract without competition to keep its services running for a limited time. Later, the department plans to award a contract through a competitive process in which other companies can take part.

For now, HHS says Anthropic's Claude is the only tool that meets its needs. These include chatting, writing drafts, summarizing information, analyzing data, accessing applications, and managing administrative settings.

The notice said, “The capability is specific to one provider: Claude is Anthropic’s proprietary model family, and the requirement is continuity of the existing Claude deployment already.” This means HHS says it needs to keep using the Claude system it already has.

It is hard to tell from the notice alone which specific contracts or agreements this new contract without competition would continue. However, it is publicly known that HHS uses Claude.

HHS gave its workers access to Claude in December 2025. This followed Anthropic's offer to provide its services to government agencies for $1 a year. HHS also listed ways it used Claude in its list of AI uses for 2025.

HHS also used Claude in Elsa, a chatbot at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But, as Fierce Biotech reported, the FDA began switching Elsa to Google's Gemini earlier this year. This followed the Trump administration's ban on Anthropic across the federal government. That ban came after a disagreement between Anthropic and the Pentagon.

The legal fight over that disagreement is still going on. The Pentagon still appears to be in conflict with Anthropic, but the company seems to have better relations with officials in other parts of the government.

The notice also comes as Anthropic's discounted deal with government agencies, offered through the General Services Administration's OneGov initiative, is set to end on October 31. Like deals offered by other companies, Anthropic's deal has been extended beyond its original end date. After the deal ends, at least OpenAI has announced a new pricing plan in which customers pay based on how much they use the service.

HHS and Anthropic did not respond to FedScoop's requests for comment.

The notice has also raised concerns.

Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for Government Procurement Law Studies at George Washington University, told FedScoop that the notice seems to show HHS depends on Claude.

Tillipman said that if switching to a new company would be too difficult or too expensive, HHS had done a poor job negotiating its deal, even though there had been warnings about this risk. She has previously written about this risk, known as vendor lock-in. This happens when an organization relies so heavily on one company that moving to another becomes difficult. It is a growing concern when governments buy AI services.

Tillipman also said HHS's notice describes fairly common chatbot services. She questioned whether the department had a good reason to say that only Claude could provide these services and use that claim to justify a contract without competition.

Tillipman said, “To me, it just reeks of … ‘this is going to be a pain, so let’s just keep it going,’ but that’s not a normal justification.”

HHS said in the notice that it eventually plans to buy AI services for large organizations through a competitive process. The process could give contracts to several companies under one blanket purchase agreement. The department called the planned agreement the “HHS Enterprise Frontier SI Models and Advanced Features multiple-award BPA.” It was not immediately clear whether the competition had already started.