A standard clause for buying a language model
The US General Services Administration has written a standard contract clause for buying large language models, and law firms tracking the text say it takes effect on 19 October. The clause, 552.239-7001, is titled Basic Safeguarding of Data within Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence Systems, and it is marked September 2026 in the deviated regulation GSA publishes as a single, continuously updated PDF on Acquisition.gov.
Client alerts from Crowell & Moring and from the contracts consultancy Winvale both date the issuance to 28 September and the effective date to 19 October, with contracting officers free to use it earlier. Because it is a regulation deviation rather than a finished rule, it is policy until GSA either rescinds it or codifies it through formal rulemaking with a public comment period.
When it applies, and when it deletes itself
The clause goes into solicitations and contracts when the government is procuring an LLM, generative assistant, chatbot, agentic system or LLM-enabled productivity tool where the language-model functionality is a material feature and government data is submitted directly to, or produced by, the model.
It is self-deleting in two cases. The first is where the contractor’s LLM use is confined to its own back-office or performance-support systems, not delivered to or accessed by the government, even if those systems incidentally process government data. The second is where the language-model functionality is incidental to what is being bought — the text gives the example of a product whose primary purpose is not AI, where the LLM is not required by the solicitation and is not used to process government data.
Obligations flow down to subcontractors performing AI design, development, deployment or operation and monitoring, as those tasks are defined in Appendix A of the NIST AI Risk Management Framework 1.0. The paragraphs about origin, ownership, jurisdiction and foreign control do not have to flow down to an open-LLM component or a fully open model.
Seventy-two hours, and a question about foreign law
Two notification clocks run at 72 hours. The contractor must tell the contracting officer within 72 hours of learning of a material violation of the clause — defined as one that has caused, or would reasonably be expected to cause, a significant adverse effect on performance or government data — and within 72 hours of discovering a security incident affecting an LLM used on the contract.
More unusual is what sits in the advance-notice paragraph. Alongside the expected triggers, the contractor must give notice of any modification, configuration or training change made to the model to comply with a non-US government statute, regulation or policy, where that change materially affects the model’s outputs, accuracy or truthfulness. In other words, a federal buyer wants to be told when a foreign rule has altered what its model says.
The clause also governs model retirement. Before discontinuing or replacing a model in use, the contractor must use reasonable efforts to give the government concurrent access to the successor for at least 30 days for a major version and 15 days for a minor one. Where a third-party provider’s own deprecation forces the change, notification replaces concurrent access.
Accuracy as a reasonable-efforts obligation
An earlier draft’s “unbiased AI” framing is gone. In its place, the contractor must use reasonable efforts to design, train and configure the model so that it prioritises accuracy, scientific inquiry and objectivity when answering factual questions, and acknowledges uncertainty where reliable information is incomplete or contradictory. The same obligation applies to background data the contractor curates and the model draws on.
On remedies, the government keeps the right to suspend use of the LLM at any time. If a contract is terminated for cause after the contractor fails to remediate a written notice of non-compliance, the contractor is liable for reasonable decommissioning costs — but not re-procurement or replacement-system development, and not more than 25% of the value of the affected task or delivery order. The government has to disclose enough of its reasoning, under confidentiality protections, for the contractor to understand the basis of the decision.
On intellectual property, the government retains full ownership of government data and of any custom development, while the contractor’s background data and pre-existing products are carved out.
What to watch is the formal rulemaking GSA says will follow, and the November MAS solicitation refresh through which the clause reaches existing schedule holders.
