When Your AI Partner Becomes Your AI Parent: The Dependency Trap That No Contract Can Fix

<p>A public institution procures an AI diagnostic system. The vendor passes every benchmark, delivers comprehensive training, commits to local data processing. Three years later, the vendor is acquired. The new parent company migrates the system to a unified cloud, revises the data processing commitment, and retires the interface the staff was trained on. The institution has a contract. The contract is with an entity that no longer exists. This is not a procurement failure. It is the default outcome of treating AI systems as products when they are relationships.</p><p>The dependency trap is structural. Information asymmetry, update dependency, exit friction, and acquisition risk combine to make dependency the default outcome of public sector AI procurement. Understanding how the trap works is the first step to building exit-ready procurement that produces partnerships, not dependencies.</p>