USD 6.6 billion for one supplier: the concentration risk hiding in your AI plan
OpenAI’s funding round on 2 October 2024 valued it at USD 157 billion. The number is not the interesting part. The dependency is.
On 2 October 2024 OpenAI closed a USD 6.6 billion funding round at a post-money valuation of USD 157 billion, led by Thrive Capital. It was the largest venture round on record and brought the company’s total raised to roughly USD 17.9 billion.
For a Swiss SME with thirty employees, the headline number changes nothing. The structure behind it should change one thing: how you write your next software contract.
The quiet dependency
Most AI features bought in 2024 are not really products. They are a thin layer over one supplier’s model. Your document tool, your CRM add-on, your meeting summariser — ask the vendor which model sits underneath and the answer is very often the same name.
That is a concentration you never explicitly approved. It is invisible in your supplier list, because on paper you have five vendors. Underneath, you may have one.
Why it matters more than usual
Three reasons, none of them dramatic.
Price is set by one party. Costs have been falling, which is pleasant and not guaranteed. A supplier that funds itself at this scale eventually has to earn a return.
Terms change unilaterally. Model versions are retired, rate limits shift, data-handling terms get revised. You find out by email.
Availability is shared. When one provider has an incident, every tool built on it degrades at the same moment. That is a different risk profile from five independent outages.
What to write into the next contract
- Name the subprocessor. Require the vendor to state which model provider they use, in which country the inference happens, and to notify you before changing it.
- Ask for an exit. Can your prompts, templates and history be exported in a usable form? Get the answer before signing, not during a migration.
- Check the training clause. Your content must not be used to train third-party models. This is standard for business tiers and absent from many consumer ones.
- Keep one process model-agnostic. At least one important workflow should be built so the model underneath can be swapped. It is insurance, and it also keeps the vendor honest at renewal.
None of this argues against using the best available model. It argues for knowing, in writing, exactly which one you are using and what happens when it changes.