Artificial intelligence company Perplexity is moving to offer federal agencies secure and streamlined access to its suite of services, a potential prelude to a broader agreement with the U.S. government.
The firm — which offers an AI-powered search engine — announced its “Perplexity for Government” initiative on Monday, which will automatically identify federal networks and then provide users with secure access to its models. Perplexity said it will “enforce zero data usage” on these queries and will not store or maintain any requests.
“It’s aimed at solving for the needs of feds today,”Jerry Ma, vice president of policy and global affairs at Perplexity, told Nextgov/FCW about the government-focused offerings. Ma previously served as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s emerging technologies lead before departing the agency in May.
“Feds are already using AI tools. Most of that usage is through public tools, and sensitive government data is being exposed as a result,” Ma said. “We are providing secure-by-default AI to all federal users, straight from our public platform.”
The release of Perplexity’s new offerings come amid a broader government push to procure services directly from outside vendors. The General Services Administration announced the launch of its OneGov initiative in April, which seeks to provide agencies “easier access to IT tools with standardized terms and pricing.”
GSA has brokered over a dozen agreements with tech firms since then — including with ServiceNow, Amazon Web Services, OpenAI and Microsoft — to offer the government significant discounts on software offerings.
Ma said Perplexity’s new government-focused effort is separate from the OneGov initiative, although he did not rule out the possibility of a future agreement with GSA.
“We’re incredibly enthusiastic about the OneGov strategy and are in active discussion with relevant officials on partnering through this route,” Ma said.
Perplexity also announced the launch of an “Enterprise Pro for Government” subscription service on Monday, which it hopes to include in a OneGov deal.
The company’s press release echoed Ma’s comments, saying that “pursuant to GSA’s OneGov strategy, we are in active discussions with federal officials to offer Perplexity Enterprise Pro for Government through government-wide vehicles such as the Multiple Award Schedule, at $0.25 per agency for the first 15 months.”
