NEWS: First wave of contracts totalling $4.4M under the $118M IRS BPA were awarded to Fedstack, Gauntlet AI, Fearless, and Sokat. Codesmith with no reported contracts.

I think it comes down alignment. Codesmith has like no staff left and none of them have extensive AI experience. They hired random people on Upwork to manage this thing, from marketing to program management to working on the contracts. I don't see students in 2026. I don't see placements in 2026. The "CIRR Audited Outcomes" haven't been updated this year, and CIRR has not responded to why. Their website doesn't even have a privacy policy. A 2024-2025 lawsuit said that their financials required six months of forensic accounting to assemble and could not be provided on demand. Codesmith's AI curriculum is minimal and created by recent alumni. I'm not an expert but I would guess they would have trouble with the most basic government audit. Additionally, the AI "Lead Engineer" on the IRS stuff is a full time engineer at a top tier bank. I also suspect that's problematic to have them on confidential IRS stuff. TLDR: there is SO MUCH paperwork and overhead with these things and that has never been their strong suit. Gauntlet has funding, an entire executive team, dedicated people with experience working on the pitching, happy customers for recent testimonials, a modern and constantly evolving curriculum, evidence of running bespoke training engineers for companies on AI already, they have supplied a number of engineers to the government through Gauntlet For America, they have full time in house instruction. For the other three companies, all of them have done past government contracts and I just suspect they have their paperwork in place as well.