Maryland's SUN Bucks Bilingual AI Chatbot — Claude-Powered Benefits Support for 600,000+ Families

Maryland administers SUN Bucks (Summer EBT), providing food benefits to low-income families with school-age children. In June 2025 the state's Department of Human Services and Governor's Innovation Team deployed a bilingual (English/Spanish) chatbot built on Anthropic's Claude Sonnet to help families access the $72.5 million benefit — described by the state as its largest summer childhood-hunger investment on record — and to answer routine questions without a call to the state hotline.
More than 600,000 Marylanders receiving SUN Bucks used the chatbot, and the state reported reduced call-center volume as it absorbed routine queries (Anthropic and Governor's Office announcements, June–November 2025). Independent reporting by The Baltimore Banner separately put the number of newly reached families at around 18,000, a different metric from the same rollout. In November 2025, Governor Wes Moore expanded the partnership — funded in part by a $525,000 Rockefeller Foundation grant — to apply Claude to roughly 150,000 benefit-verification documents Maryland caseworkers process monthly across SNAP, Medicaid, TANF and WIC.
The expansion has run into real friction: the U.S. Defense Secretary designated Anthropic a "supply-chain risk" in March 2026 amid a federal dispute over AI vendors, and Maryland's own IT secretary publicly acknowledged the state had little visibility into how that designation was reached. The state's own MarylandBenefits.org portal relaunch also excluded the AI assistant, citing insufficient comfort with the technology at that stage — a reminder that a working pilot and a fully governed, trusted rollout are not the same thing.

Read the full analysis: https://governor.maryland.gov/news/press-releases/maryland-governor-wes-moore-announces-landmark-ai-partnership-transform-state-service-delivery