Best LLM for Government / FedRAMP
Ranked on FedRAMP / IL authorization, data sovereignty, and reasoning quality. Certification pillar dominates.
Updated April 2026. Top 3 this month: GPT-5, Gemini 2 Pro, Claude Opus 4.7.
How we rank
US government and defense workloads require FedRAMP authorization (Moderate or High) and often IL4/IL5. We rank based on availability of authorized endpoints (Azure OpenAI Gov, AWS Bedrock GovCloud, Google Public Sector), then reasoning quality, then price.
Pillars and weights: FedRAMP (50%) · MMLU (20%) · data sovereignty (15%) · price (15%). Our full methodology is published on the methodology page.
Top ranked models
| Rank | Model | Provider | Input $/1M | Output $/1M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | GPT-5 | OpenAI | $1.25 | $10.00 | 200,000 |
| 2 | Gemini 2 Pro | $3.50 | $10.50 | 2,000,000 | |
| 3 | Claude Opus 4.7 | Anthropic | $5.00 | $25.00 | 200,000 |
| 4 | Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite | $0.07 | $0.30 | 1,000,000 | |
| 5 | Mistral 7B | Mistral | $0.20 | $0.20 | 32,768 |
| 6 | llama-3.2-1b-instruct | Meta | $0.20 | $0.20 | 60,000 |
| 7 | qwen2-1.5b-instruct | Alibaba (Qwen) | $0.20 | $0.20 | — |
| 8 | deepseek-chat | DeepSeek | $0.14 | $0.28 | 164,000 |
| 9 | GPT-5 nano | OpenAI | $0.05 | $0.40 | 400,000 |
| 10 | Gemini 2.0 Flash | $0.10 | $0.40 | 1,000,000 |
Tips for government / fedramp
- Confirm the exact authorization level (Moderate vs High) matches your program's needs.
- Government tenants often trail the public product by 3–6 months.
- Build abstraction layers so you can swap models without code changes as authorizations update.
Frequently asked questions
Which LLMs are FedRAMP authorized?
As of April 2026 our weighted top 3 authorized options are GPT-5, Gemini 2 Pro, Claude Opus 4.7.
Can I use public OpenAI for FedRAMP workloads?
No. Use Azure OpenAI Gov or a FedRAMP-authorized alternative.
Do IL4 and IL5 matter for my use case?
Only if you handle controlled unclassified or classified data. For FOUO / CUI, Moderate is usually sufficient.
Related tasks
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Data refreshed daily via our snapshot cron. See our public JSON API for programmatic access.