What Is Vendor Lock-In?

Vendor Lock-In — a situation in which switching away from an AI provider, model, or platform is costly or impractical, leaving an organisation dependent on a single supplier's pricing, terms, and continuity.

Lock-in builds up quietly — through proprietary APIs, fine-tuned models, prompts, and data pipelines tied to one provider. It is the organisation-level face of concentration risk: when exit is hard, a price rise, policy change, or outage at the provider becomes your problem too. Mitigations include abstraction layers, keeping data and prompts portable, and maintaining a tested fallback option.

Source: IT procurement and cloud risk-management practice