Federal departments and agencies hold about 29,000 paid Microsoft 365 Copilot licences between them, according to answers 67 Commonwealth entities gave to questions on notice from the most recent round of Senate estimates. It is the first count of paid artificial intelligence subscriptions across the federal government that exists in one place, and it exists because a senator asked for it.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade holds more than 7,000 of those licences. The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing holds more than 5,000. Those two agencies account for roughly 40 per cent of the total between them.
Copilot is not the only product in the building. The Attorney-General's Department reported 652 licences for Google's Gemini notebook tool. The Digital Transformation Agency reported nine Anthropic Claude licences and eight Gemini licences, both described as trials. The Parliamentary Budget Office reported five Claude licences and two Google AI Ultra subscriptions, and the Australian Fisheries Management Authority reported five Claude licences.
Smaller deployments run alongside them. GitHub Copilot accounts for 164 licences across the employment department, the National Disability Insurance Agency and the two federal courts. The Australian Digital Health Agency reported 40 Copilot Studio licences, the Department of Social Services reported ten Otter.ai transcription licences, and the NDIA reported using Amazon Bedrock.
Sixty-seven entities answered. There are far more than 67 Commonwealth bodies, so the count is a floor rather than a total, and the answers give licence numbers rather than what any of it costs.
That is the part worth sitting with. Since 15 December 2025 the Digital Transformation Agency's policy for the responsible use of AI in government has required departments and agencies to name an accountable official, keep an internal register of AI use cases and publish a transparency statement to a central register. From 15 June 2026 the use case register became mandatory for 94 non-corporate Commonwealth entities, with impact assessments and incident reporting due to follow in December. None of that machinery is built to report how many seats an agency bought or what it paid, and the licence counts in these answers largely do not appear in the published statements.
Most of the Copilot seats are bought under the sixth volume sourcing arrangement between the DTA and Microsoft, a five year deal that started on 1 July 2026 covering Copilot, Microsoft 365, Azure, Dynamics 365 and Microsoft's security and identity services. The DTA has said the arrangement carries capped price increases to give agencies cost certainty. It has not said what the caps are, on the ground that they are commercially confidential. The previous arrangement, running since 2019, has cost more than $1.2 billion.
Nicole Bain, the DTA's branch manager for whole-of-government contracts, has said the arrangement "allows an agency to procure Copilot under the VSA should they wish to do so". Take-up is a matter for each agency, and the numbers in these answers are what that decision has added up to so far. Microsoft is also putting $1.55 million into a training fund for public service skills, including ethical use of AI.
The productivity case sitting underneath all of this is thinner than the licence count suggests. The whole-of-government Copilot trial in 2024 found participants saved around an hour a day. That figure comes from the evaluation of the trial, it is drawn from what participants reported about themselves, and it has not been reproduced as a measurement of output across an agency at scale.
What the answers establish is the size of the deployment and the shape of the market inside government: one vendor with almost all of it, a handful of small trials elsewhere, and no published price. What they do not establish is the spend. That number sits in the contracts, not the transparency statements, and the caps that govern it are not public.
