Executive summary Three consecutive administrations have made adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) across the U.S. federal government a priority. Most recently, the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan highlighted AI’s potential to “help deliver the highly responsive government the American people expect and deserve.” To assess the current state of AI adoption across the federal government, this report draws on AI use case inventories from 2023 to 2025, federal jobs data, OMB memoranda, request for information submissions, and interviews with current and former federal technologists across eight agencies. While the scope and pace of AI adoption accelerated significantly over the past three years, AI use across the federal government remains concentrated among a handful of large agencies. Workforce capacity constraints, a risk-averse culture, procurement and funding challenges, and low public trust in AI systems slow adoption efforts. To bolster responsible AI adoption, the federal government could expand support for technical talent and AI literacy across agencies; continue to address the structural barriers in procurement, regulation, and budgeting that hinder technology modernization more broadly; and foster public trust through stronger transparency practices, improved use case inventories, and a focus on high-impact, positive applications that demonstrably improve how government serves the American people. AI adoption within the federal government has been a bipartisan priority, but the scale and pace of its use varies significantly by agency The Trump and Biden administrations both emphasized the importance of the federal government adopting AI to improve service delivery, foster data-driven decisionmaking, promote national competitiveness, and bolster national security. The first Trump administration elevated such adoption as a focus in 2020 through an executive order that required agencies to inventory their use cases, set governance processes, and experiment with AI adoption. The Biden administration continued these efforts in a 2023 executive order, introducing expanded requirements for risk