Microsoft announced on Wednesday that its OpenAI-enabled Azure offerings will be available to more of the federal workforce through a new Defense Information Systems Agency authorization that marks the service as approved across all government classification levels.
Confirmed in a blog post, DISA cleared Azure OpenAI Service for workloads at the Impact Level 6, bringing its capabilities to all U.S. government data classification levels. Some of the tools now available for that high-security work include Open AI’s large language models, as well as Microsoft’s speech recognition, translation, text classification, entity extraction capabilities and more.
The DISA authorization was originally granted in early February.
“Microsoft is committed to providing U.S. government customers and their partners with access to highly resilient and secure AI capabilities through Azure’s commercial, U.S. government, and classified clouds,” the company said in its blog post. “These capabilities are critical to enabling government customers and industry partners to transform America’s world-leading AI advancements into next-generation military and national security capabilities.”
The complete government cloud permissions granted to Microsoft Azure’s AI products now include FedRAMP High, DOD IL2-6, and top secret work at the ICD503 level. These authorizations allow federal workers and their partners to deploy Microsoft’s AI tools for a diverse range of mission needs.
Microsoft has been working to get its AI software products approved for government cloud integration over the course of several years. In May 2024, Microsoft confirmed the ability of Chat GPT-4 in the Azure Government Top Secret Cloud, culminating ambitions executives at the company had dating back to 2021.
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