01 / The Model
Model provider
Whoever runs the model for you. Usually a company such as Anthropic, OpenAI or Google, occasionally your own hardware. Your choice of provider sets your cost, your speed, and where your data goes.
How you’ll hear it
“Where does our data go when staff use this?”
“To whichever provider runs the model. That is the contract to read.”
Avoid
Treating the choice of provider as a purely technical decision.
The longer version
The provider is the company, or your own infrastructure, that runs the model. The choice sets price, speed, which models you can use, where data is processed and what the contract allows. For regulated organisations it is a procurement and legal decision before it is a technical one.