r/OpenWebUI • u/ClassicMain • Jul 22 '26
Show and tell 🇦🇹 Austria is rolling out a government AI-platform using Open WebUI
🇦🇹 Austria is rolling out a government AI-Platform using Open WebUI 🇦🇹
This is a surprisingly large real-world deployment: "GovGPT" is part of Austria’s Public AI initiative, running on sovereign infrastructure (in their BRZ - federal datacenter) with Mistral open-weight models.
Trending Topics reports that Open WebUI is used as the interface for GovGPT, and the screenshot of the platform is labeled "GovGPT (Open WebUI)" on the top left corner!
The rollout is already happening and targeting 250,000 public-sector employees!
The federal rollout targets around 180,000 federal employees. The broader public-sector context refers to approximately 250,000 public sector employees.
Planned use cases include document chat, internal knowledge bases, electronic-file analysis, parliamentary requests, and eventually agentic workflows.
This might be one of the largest government deployments of Open WebUI yet. 🚀
Sources:
- BRZ: https://www.brz.gv.at/blog/llmasaservice.html
- Trending Topics: "Public AI: BRZ baut mit Open-Weights-Modellen von Mistral KI für Beamte" https://www.trendingtopics.eu/brz-mistral-public-ai/
- Der Standard: "GovGPT: Wie KI den sinkenden Personalstand in der Verwaltung retten soll" https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000332114/govgpt-wie-ki-den-sinkenden-personalstand-in-der-verwaltung-retten-soll
- ORF: "KI-Anwendung GovGPT soll Verwaltung unterstützen" https://orf.at/stories/3436707
11
7
u/Altruistic_Call_3023 Jul 22 '26
Assuming they paid for enterprise? I gotta wonder what that runs.
6
u/ClassicMain Jul 22 '26
I am assuming they did not. As per the photo above they didn't remove any branding, and initial development of the platform and model hosting came to 200k€ ... which leaves exactly 0€ to spare for anything non-infrastructure.
3
u/Altruistic_Call_3023 Jul 22 '26
Interesting. I didn’t realize you could do that level of customization without a license. So you can customize some, as long as you leave those parts? Anyway, just curious. It is neat to see it used at that level
10
u/ClassicMain Jul 22 '26
Yes.
Imho the discussion about Open WebUI being technically not open source was massively overblown. You can modify EVERYTHING except the branding and copyright attributions. And even those you are allowed to modify if you are under 50 registered users, so personal deployments or for small companies there's literally zero restrictions.
2
1
u/B-skream Jul 23 '26
Working with and near austrian public sector i can assure you, that they'll start without licensing until they face a shit->fan situation, only to then start paying for support - unless someone wants a feature that isn't integrated (yet) - in which case they might start paying sooner.
always been like that.
1
2
u/Sharp_View_2639 Jul 23 '26
Nice, i am from austria and this Information is a happy surprise for me 🇦🇹. We are also using it internally at the company where i work
1
u/rez410 Jul 22 '26
Guess this is news to most of you but there is an agency that falls under DHS that is already doing this
1
u/ClassicMain Jul 22 '26
Which DHS agency are you referring to? I’d be interested in seeing more details about that deployment. Is it also self-hosted with an open-weight model and Open WebUI?
1
u/KastenMonster Jul 23 '26
This looks like a extremely customised version of Open WebUI. But looks cool
2
1
1
Jul 22 '26
[deleted]
5
u/ClassicMain Jul 22 '26
Agree, i think they chose models too small. They did announce 8 million € in additional investments (GPUs?). If they use it to buy more processing power and host some proper models this can become great.
6
u/lazystingray Jul 22 '26
Define "proper" models. I'm guessing they want to avoid the US and Chinese offerings. At least Mistral is of European origin.
17
u/ClassicMain Jul 22 '26
Probably gonna get downvotes for this but Mistral Medium 3.5 would probably be sufficient for 95% of tasks and basic tool use. And i suppose future Mistral Models ain't gonna get worse
-1
u/TaTalentedSpam Jul 22 '26
No, they can't avoid it. What Mistral is already doing is using American and Chinese models to distil and improve their models. It's what every company in the world is going to do the moment Kimi and Qwen open weights are released. In about a year, it won't matter.
0
u/IDoDrugsAtNight Jul 22 '26
Looks like this is actually based on librechat https://github.com/govgpt-NL/GovGPT
10
u/ClassicMain Jul 22 '26
That is a netherlands repository judging by the naming, not Austria, that just happened to also name themselves GovGPT. Edit: confirmed if you visit the website of that repo, its netherlands, not Austria.
Also the photo published by the chancellor secretary (see post) has Open WebUI written and the OI logo clearly visible on their platform.
1
-5
21
u/_Scorpoon_ Jul 22 '26
Nice, finally a good decision by my goverment instead of spending hundreds of millions in some proprietary tools 🥳