Federal Contract Solicitations Naming AI (% of Solicitations)

## What this measures

The percentage of each month's solicitations whose title or description names AI (see procurement.sam.solicitations.ai for the rules).

## Why it matters

The share removes the September rush, so it reads as how much of what agencies buy involves AI.

## How to read it

Higher means AI is a bigger part of federal bids. The series starts in January 2020 at 0.07%. The latest month, September 2026, is 0.33%. The high is 0.33% (August 2026) and the low 0.04% (February 2020).

## What it does not say

Not every federal purchase is posted: purchases under $25,000, orders under existing contracts and some classified or urgent buys are not. Solicitations rarely carry a dollar value, so these series count notices, not dollars. One requirement can be posted as several notices.

## How it's built

Each notice is counted once, by its posted date and its base type, the type it was first posted as (a solicitation later turned into an award notice still counts as a solicitation). Solicitations = solicitations and combined synopsis/solicitations. History from January 2020: SAM.gov replaced FBO.gov as the system of record in November 2019, and about half the notices carried over from FBO have no department. From the last 25 months Palanor keeps one slim row per notice and recomputes the closed months on every run; a month is published three days after it ends. AI rules (sam-v2-2026-10-20): the title or description says "artificial intelligence", "machine learning", "large language model", "generative AI", "deep learning", "neural network", "computer vision" or "natural language processing", or the title has "AI", "LLM" or "AI/ML" in capitals as a whole word, except parts titles (those starting with a federal supply class, "15--…", where "AI" means aircraft). The first rules (v1) also read "AI" in descriptions and failed a precision check on 40 random matches because of those parts titles; v2 replaced them the same day, before anything was published.

## Source

SAM.gov Contract Opportunities, U.S. General Services Administration: the public data extracts on sam.gov/data-services (ContractOpportunitiesFullCSV.csv, every active notice, daily; the Archived Data files FY2018 on). Public domain. Refreshed daily by /api/cron/sam-opportunities-sync.