Governor Newsom Announces First-of-Its-Kind Partnership With Anthropic to Bring Claude AI to California State and Local Agencies

My take: This one landed with a big smile. Today, July 1, California officially rolls out Poppy statewide, an AI assistant built BY government workers FOR government workers, and Governor Newsom just signed a deal with Anthropic giving every state agency, city, and county in California Claude access at 50% off, plus free workforce training and direct support from Anthropic engineers on call. 2,800 employees across 67 departments already piloted it, and now it is going to the full state workforce. It is like when your boss negotiates a company-wide contract for the AI tool you were already paying for out of pocket, and suddenly it is half the price and covered 😅. But what stands out to me is not the discount: it is that Poppy is not a product California bought off a shelf, state workers built it themselves, trained on CA.gov data, running inside the state's own secure infrastructure. I build apps with Claude Code every single day, and watching the largest government in the US do the same thing at massive scale tells me something clear: AI as a building tool is no longer a startup thing.