An agency decides it wants to use a frontier model on controlled unclassified information. Someone finds a vendor announcement saying the service is FedRAMP High authorized. The requirement gets written, the architecture gets drawn, and the question of whether that specific model is available at that specific level in that specific region gets answered much later, by an assessor.
This is a solvable problem. Both major cloud providers publish the answer, maintained and dated, in tables that almost nobody reads. What follows is those tables read closely, as of September 2026.
Why the announcements mislead without being wrong
Vendor announcements are accurate and incomplete in a consistent way. They name a service and a level, and they omit the region, the deployment cloud, the model, and the date. Each of those four things changes the answer.
Take the clearest example. Azure OpenAI appears in Microsoft’s audit-scope tables twice. In Azure public it is in scope for FedRAMP High and DoD IL2. In Azure Government it is in scope for FedRAMP High, IL2, IL4, IL5WI and IL6. Same service name, two very different scopes, and only the second one reaches controlled unclassified information at impact level 4 or 5.
An agency that reads “Azure OpenAI is FedRAMP High authorized” and deploys in commercial Azure has not made a mistake about the authorization. It has made a mistake about which authorization.
IL5 is not one thing
A second precision problem sits inside the Azure Government column. The heading is not IL5. It is IL5WI, which Microsoft defines as the DoD SRG Impact Level 5 Workload Isolation Provisional Authorization.
Microsoft’s own note is explicit: in the US Gov Arizona, Texas and Virginia regions, services require extra configuration to meet DoD IL5 compute and storage isolation requirements. There is a separate IL5 audit scope for the US DoD Central and US DoD East regions.
So “Azure OpenAI is IL5 authorized” compresses three facts into one claim: it is authorized at IL5 via workload isolation, contingent on configuration the customer implements, in one set of regions, with a different scope in another set. Each of those clauses is a project decision.
