Build Your AI Stack Like You Will Need to Replace It
InfoWorld, Thursday, September 10th, 2026
AI prices are subsidized and will rise, so architect for portability with an abstraction layer to limit vendor lock-in.
Current AI services are heavily subsidized as providers chase market share, and price hikes are inevitable, so early architecture choices may trap teams.
The foundation for portability is an internal abstraction layer or gateway, such as LiteLLM or Portkey, that applications call instead of hitting Claude, GPT or Gemini directly.
Teams should route direct vendor API calls through it, focusing on the common text-in, text-out and tool-call cases.
The harder part is behavioral portability: prompts tuned to one model, fine-tuning, incompatible embeddings, tool-calling schemas and caching rules all create lock-in no gateway can solve.