The Great Washington Price War of Artificial Minds

In August 2025, Washington staged a theater of the absurd. Three of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies—OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google—entered a bidding war not to make money, but to give their technology away. ChatGPT for one dollar. Claude for one dollar. Gemini for forty-seven cents.

These were not startup gimmicks or one-off marketing stunts. These were official federal contracts, signed and stamped by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), authorizing government workers to use the most advanced AI models on earth for less than the cost of a candy bar.

The immediate question was obvious: why would companies valued in the tens or hundreds of billions voluntarily slash their flagship products down to pennies? The answer lies not in accounting, but in politics, legitimacy, and the long game of infrastructure control.