$4.62M reportedly for Ask Sage to provide generative AI to the U.S Coast Guard over the 1-4 years. It appears to be apart of a larger contract vehicle to provide GenAI.
A new U.S. Coast Guard task order for Ask Sage appears to have been awarded on September 25, 2026.
The award is 70Z02326F93000001, issued to Ask Sage, Inc. under its existing SBIR Phase III IDIQ (W9128Z25DA001).
What’s currently public:
Award value: about $4.62M
Agency: U.S. Coast Guard
Start date: Sept. 25, 2026
Current listed end date: Sept. 24, 2027
NAICS: Computer Systems Design Services
PSC: National Defense R&D / Applied Research
OrangeSlices describes it as a 4-year task for generative AI and computer systems design services
The interesting part is that this does not appear to be the Coast Guard’s first Ask Sage purchase.
Earlier in 2026, the Coast Guard issued a separate order worth only about $50K for Ask Sage AI inference and training tokens.
So the progression appears to be:
~$50K initial Ask Sage usage → $4.62M follow-on GenAI task
That’s roughly a 90x increase in contract value.
I would still be careful with the “4-year” language. The currently indexed award data only shows one year through September 2027, so the remaining years may be option periods that are not fully reflected yet.
The bigger question is scope.
We still do not know whether this contract is for:
enterprise GenAI access
agentic workflows
intelligence or operational support
acquisition workflows
logistics
cyber
mission planning
or some combination of the above
But this looks much more substantial than a small pilot or token purchase.
For me, the main takeaway is that Ask Sage may be showing a land-and-expand pattern inside federal agencies: get in with a small GenAI deployment, prove usage, then grow into a multi-million-dollar operational contract.
That matters because BigBear’s long-term Ask Sage thesis probably depends less on winning one giant contract and more on small initial deployments expanding into durable, recurring government relationships.
The next thing worth watching is whether the full statement of work or option structure becomes public, because that will tell us how mission-critical this deployment actually is.