New Federal AI Platform Risks Corporate Capture, Worker Displacement, and Equity Blind Spots
Washington, D.C. — Today, the Trump administration’s General Services Administration (GSA) announced the launch of USAi, a closed platform allowing federal employees to experiment with generative AI tools from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. The agency dubiously claims the platform will protect privacy by ensuring government data does not feed back into the companies’ models.. The he program opens the door to risky automation and entrenches the dominance of the largest tech firms inside government
Under the program, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta will sell access to their AI models for $1 over the next year. These terms may appear like a bargain for taxpayers but in reality function as a market capture strategy. Such contracts risk making federal employees dependent on these companies’ systems, granting them an unfair advantage over smaller AI startups, and further cementing their market dominance.
J.B. Branch, Big Tech Accountability Advocate with Public Citizen, issued the following statement in response:
“As we saw with the recent federal court data breach, no system is hacker-proof. It’s also disturbing that the federal government is paving the way for automated and agentic tasks. These tools are marketed as making employees’ jobs easier, but agentic AI is largely unregulated and untested in making important decisions like loan approval, medicare enrollment, or social security payments. The systems may have biased responses tied to historical data, which is troubling given the Trump administration’s ‘Woke AI’ executive order aiming to keep issues of diversity and equity out of AI.
“The administration says it wants innovation, but is only offering opportunities to the biggest tech companies. They tout a closed federal AI system for safety, yet offer no assurances that these AI decisions will reflect equity for all Americans. This is a contradictory and dangerous path. It risks replacing public-sector judgment with corporate-controlled algorithms while sidelining competition and accountability. The Trump administration must pause this expansion until enforceable guardrails are put in place to ensure transparency, fairness, worker protections, and open market competition.”