Sweden’s Regeringskansliet, the administration that serves the government and its ministries, is blocking the web interfaces of Claude and ChatGPT. From Monday, October 26, staff cannot reach them from their work computers. Ekot, the newsroom of Sveriges Radio, reported the decision on October 23. The Regeringskansliet’s own press office confirmed it, in a written reply to the public broadcaster SVT.
Employees are pointed to Microsoft’s Copilot instead. That one is approved, and after a review the agency raised its security settings.
The reason given is the missing contract
Director of digitalisation Mikael Wettercrantz turned down an interview with Ekot but left one sentence on the intranet: using AI services without a contract could have “consequences for our information security.” So this is not about the models. It is about who the house has an agreement with and who it does not.
The block is not airtight either. In its reply to SVT the press office writes that the web interfaces for ChatGPT and Claude will no longer be reachable from October 26, but that staff keep access to both language models through a platform called Intric, which the Regeringskansliet built itself. What is being closed is the browser door, not the model.
Sweden is not alone, and this is not where it started
Ekot counted the others. The tax agency Skatteverket has blocked, so has the Statens institutionsstyrelse, and at the enforcement authority Kronofogden the question is being prepared for a decision. DeepSeek had already been restricted at the Regeringskansliet before this.
How much demand there is shows up in a case at Trafikverket, the transport administration. Its internal audit found widespread and risky use of around ten different AI services this year and noted that the issue was “the sensitivity of the information entered” and how the answers were handled.
The contract decides, not the model
This is awkward for Anthropic, but it says nothing about Claude. Microsoft is not winning here on better technology. It is winning on an existing framework agreement and a purchasing relationship that public bodies have maintained for decades. If you already run Exchange and Office, the data protection questions for Copilot have in principle been settled once and do not need settling again.
The Intric part is the interesting one. The Regeringskansliet considers Claude good enough to keep offering through a platform of its own. What gets banned is the route nobody supervises: the browser window a civil servant pastes a draft into. That is less a verdict on vendors than an admission that agencies cannot watch the direct line to the web—and that they have to try anyway, as long as the alternative is ten services running in parallel that the auditors only hear about afterwards.