Vendor quality gate
Procurement as governance: transparency, evaluation access, and exit terms decided while the institution still has leverage.
What it changes
Who can pull it
What it looks like institutionally
For most agencies the deepest governance decision is made at purchase, when leverage is highest and attention lowest. A vendor gate makes procurement carry the governance load: access to model behavior for independent evaluation, documentation of training data provenance, notification and re-approval on model updates, data rights that survive contract end, and exit terms that make discontinuation feasible.
The Atlas shows the price of its absence: opaque systems the deploying institution could neither inspect nor explain, defended in court by agencies that did not build them and could not audit them.
The update clause deserves emphasis. A vendor's silent model update is a redeployment without review — the gate must catch version N+1, not just version 1.
Addresses: Vendor opacity · Silent updates · No exit path. Test a version of this lever in the PAN Lab.