How InstantSam reads a solicitation

1. It finds the notice

InstantSam reads SAM.gov every hour for new solicitations, presolicitations and Sources Sought notices, and checks Grants.gov, DoD SBIR and STTR topics, DLA DIBBS and eight state and local purchasing portals as well. When an agency amends a notice, the new version is linked to the old one, and a review always belongs to the version it read.

2. It opens the attachments

The listing is not the contract; the attachments are. A document review downloads up to fifteen of a notice’s attachments and reads PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheets and archives. Scanned pages and pictures are read by an AI model too, and when a date, an amount or a name in the review comes only from a scanned page, the review says so, because a poor scan can be misread.

It reads up to 150,000 characters of each attachment and 400,000 in all. A larger notice can be read further on a paid plan, up to 30 attachments and 1,000,000 characters, for 2 or 3 reviews, and you see the number before anything is spent.

3. It writes the review from the documents alone

The review sets out the scope of work, the key requirements, the labor categories, how to submit, how offers are evaluated, eligibility and the set-aside, the risks and red flags, and what to weigh before you bid. The AI is told to use the documents and the notice’s own facts and nothing else, under these rules:

• where something is not in the documents, say “not specified in these documents” rather than guess;
• never invent a requirement, a date or a dollar figure;
• reproduce dates and notice numbers exactly as published, and name a NAICS code only by its official title.

Rules are not a guarantee, which is why the next three steps exist: they let you check the reading rather than trust it.

4. It tells you what it read

Beside every review is a summary of what it read: which attachments it read in full, which in part, which could not be read, and which it never opened. On a large notice part of the package goes unread, and you should know which part before you rely on the rest.

5. Every requirement carries its source

The compliance checklist lists up to forty requirements that decide whether an offer is accepted, the ones that would disqualify you first. Each carries the sentence of the solicitation it came from. Before the checklist reaches you, every quoted sentence is checked against the text of the documents, and a requirement whose sentence cannot be found there is dropped. Nothing on the list rests on words the solicitation does not contain.

A checklist reads less of a large notice than a review does, up to 40,000 characters of each attachment and 180,000 in all, largest first, and it says what it read in the same way.

6. Answers come with the passage

The bid assistant answers questions about a notice from its review, its checklist or the attachments themselves, and shows the passages each answer rests on, numbered by document. When the documents do not cover something, it says so instead of filling the gap.

7. You decide

InstantSam is a research aid. It reads faster than you and does not tire, but it can miss something or misread a poor scan, and the solicitation is the authority. Read a requirement in the document before you rely on it, and confirm deadlines on the official notice. Nothing is ever submitted on your behalf.

What happens to the documents and your questions

Solicitation text and your questions go to Anthropic’s model to produce your answer, and are not used to train models. Your company’s record goes with them only for a Sources Sought letter or an AI proposal draft, because those are about you. The security page has the detail, and the 22-minute guide shows all of this being used.

See also: how to read a federal solicitation by hand, and what each plan includes.