Three AI companies—OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity—are on the verge of receiving approval to sell their technology, hosted on their own cloud systems, directly to the U.S. government, a person familiar with the matter tells Fast Company. That authorization will be on a “low impact” and pilot level, the person says, but constitutes a major step toward independence.

That independence could help those companies avoid some of the complications created by ongoing partnerships between AI firms and longtime government tech contractors. As large language models have gone mainstream, AI companies have often relied on tech firms that have already passed arduous government security reviews—including Microsoft, Palantir, and Amazon Web Services—to host their chatbots for federal users. In the early days,........

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