Best for: Government / FedRAMP

Best LLM for Government / FedRAMP

Ranked on FedRAMP / IL authorization, data sovereignty, and reasoning quality. Certification pillar dominates.

Updated May 2026. Top 3 this month: R1 0528, Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-02-15, DeepSeek V3.

Podium

This month’s top three.

  • 1
    R1 0528
    DeepSeek
    Input / 1M
    $0.50
    Output / 1M
    $2.15
    Context
    163,840
    Model page
  • 2
    Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-02-15
    Qwen
    Input / 1M
    $0.26
    Output / 1M
    $1.56
    Context
    1,000,000
    Model page
  • 3
    DeepSeek V3
    DeepSeek
    Input / 1M
    $0.32
    Output / 1M
    $0.89
    Context
    163,840
    Model page

How we rank

Weights tuned for government / fedramp.

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.

Our full methodology is published on the methodology page.

Pillars and weights:

  • FedRAMP50%
  • MMLU20%
  • data sovereignty15%
  • price15%

Full ranking

Top ranked models

RankModelProviderInput $/1MOutput $/1MContext
1R1 0528DeepSeek$0.50$2.15163,840
2Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-02-15Qwen$0.26$1.561,000,000
3DeepSeek V3DeepSeek$0.32$0.89163,840
4Qwen3.5 397B A17BQwen$0.39$2.34262,144
5Hunyuan A13B InstructTencent$0.14$0.57131,072
6MiniMax M2.1MiniMax$0.29$0.95196,608
7Trinity Large PreviewArcee AI$0.00$0.00131,000
8GPT-4o (2024-11-20)OpenAI$2.50$10.00128,000
9MiniMax-01MiniMax$0.20$1.101,000,192
10Claude Sonnet 4.5Anthropic$3.00$15.001,000,000

Field notes

Tips for government / fedramp

  • 01

    Confirm the exact authorization level (Moderate vs High) matches your program's needs.

  • 02

    Government tenants often trail the public product by 3–6 months.

  • 03

    Build abstraction layers so you can swap models without code changes as authorizations update.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

The questions teams ask before picking a model for government / fedramp.

Get instant answers from our AI agent

As of May 2026 our weighted top 3 authorized options are R1 0528, Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-02-15, DeepSeek V3.
No. Use Azure OpenAI Gov or a FedRAMP-authorized alternative.
Only if you handle controlled unclassified or classified data. For FOUO / CUI, Moderate is usually sufficient.