Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service lands FedRAMP High authorization

Microsoft’s increasingly ubiquitous artificial intelligence model has gotten the green light for FedRAMP High authorization, the tech giant announced Monday, making the popular AI product available for some of the federal government’s most sensitive datasets.

Azure OpenAI Service’s approval as a service within the FedRAMP High authorization for Azure Government also includes the availability of GPT-4o, an OpenAI model that can be used for natural language understanding and processing, text summarization and classification, sentiment analysis, question answering, conversational agents and more, according to the company.

Microsoft in February first announced that it had expanded its Azure Government platform to allow agencies to use its Azure OpenAI Service, which at the time included GPT-4, and that it was working to earn FedRAMP High accreditation. 

The FedRAMP High designation denotes that the OpenAI services have met a higher security threshold to work with sensitive civilian datasets, including those in the fields of health care, law enforcement, finance and emergency response, among others. 

Other potential uses for GPT-4o, according to Microsoft, are: accelerated discovery, or the recognition of patterns and code anomalies to identify vulnerabilities and also offer suggestions to combat those vulnerabilities; augmented cognition, in which the product is paired with large datasets to help agencies spot trends and patterns; and enhanced productivity, including the creation of draft documents such as RFPs.

In a blog post accompanying the announcement, Douglas Phillips, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Azure Edge + Platform, said the availability of Azure OpenAI Service in government clouds represents the company’s commitment to “enabling government transformation with AI.” 

“Along with delivering innovations that help drive missions forward, we make AI easy to procure, easy to access, and easy to implement,” Phillips said. “Microsoft is committed to delivering more advanced AI capabilities across classification levels in the coming months.”

The announcement of Microsoft’s latest FedRAMP authorization comes after the company last week announced an expanded partnership with Palantir to boost offerings of AI capabilities to the intelligence and defense communities. Under the agreement, within Microsoft’s government and classified cloud environments, intelligence and defense officials can now utilize Palantir’s large language models through the Azure OpenAI Service within Palantir’s AI Platform (AIP).

This story was updated Aug. 12, 2024 to correct the name of the author of the Microsoft blog post.