GSA issued an AI acquisition policy for new contracts. Here’s what it says. | FedScoop

The General Services Administration has finished its AI procurement clause, and the headline achievement is a carve-out so generous it deserves a ribbon: the rule now applies only when the government is actually buying AI, not when contractors use AI internally. Seventy-five comments landed this summer, industry registered its displeasure, and the fix was to shrink the blast radius rather than raise the bar. That is the oldest move in procurement — regulate the invoice, not the workflow. Contractors can wire an LLM into everything they touch as long as the deliverable looks like plain software and the billing line says 'services'.

What survived is a reservations list. The government "reserves the right to conduct automated assessments of the LLM" for "bias, truthfulness, safety, unsolicited ideological content, and other factors determined by the Government." Unsolicited ideological content — as though ideology normally arrives with a covering letter and a stamped reply slip. And "other factors determined by the Government" is the clause equivalent of et cetera, which is to say the list isn't a specification, it's a mood. Then there's the automated assessment of bias: a machine grading another machine's homework, with a human somewhere signing the report card.

The GSA also "retains the right to suspend use of the LLM at any time", which is less a contract term than a note left on the fridge. Notice what was expressly added: AI-enabled document and productivity tools, the anodyne end of the market, where the worst outcome is a badly summarised memo. The interesting models, presumably, fall under "other factors determined by the Government" — to be decided later, by someone, in a room. Seventy-five comments, one narrowed scope, and a catch-all. That'll hold.