Definition
AI vendor evaluation is the process of assessing an AI/LLM provider's contractual, technical, and regulatory risk before adopting their model or platform.
Generic procurement frameworks miss AI-specific risk: model deprecation and behaviour-change notice, training-data indemnification, a quality SLA distinct from uptime, agentic spend ceilings, fine-tuned weight return on exit, and EU AI Act / ISO 42001 obligations. Evaluate these explicitly when the vendor is OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, or Google Vertex AI.
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