AI coding tool vendor lock-in is a real enterprise risk and most procurement teams aren't pricing it in

Vendor lock in risk for SaaS tools is well understood. Pricing power increases after switching costs accumulate. Data portability clauses get tested when you actually try to leave. Most enterprise procurement teams have frameworks for evaluating and managing this.

AI coding tools with persistent context engines create a new flavor of vendor lock in that isn't well covered by existing frameworks. After eighteen months of building organizational context in a vendor's format, that context represents a significant accumulated asset. The question most teams aren't asking at procurement time is what happens to that asset if you need to switch tools. Can you export the context in a portable format? Does the export actually work with other tools or is it just a data dump that you'd have to rebuild from? What's the contractual commitment around context portability? If your organizational context is hosted on vendor infrastructure and you're in a dispute with the vendor, what's your leverage? The context layer you've built over eighteen months may be operationally critical to your development workflow by that point.

We've started treating context portability and export capability as a first tier evaluation criterion alongside security posture and deployment architecture. It's not glamorous but it's the kind of thing you want to have negotiated before you've spent a year building context rather than after.