AI Model Vendor Preferences

How to configure per-tenant AI model vendor opt-outs so Guard automatically substitutes equivalent-tier models from permitted providers.

Guard allows tenants to exclude specific AI model vendors from all inference paths. When a vendor is opted out, Guard automatically substitutes an equivalent-tier model from a permitted vendor across every AI-powered feature — no per-feature configuration is required.

Why this matters

Data-residency requirements, contractual restrictions, and organizational policies can mandate which AI vendors are permitted to process your data. Vendor preferences let your security team use all of Guard's AI capabilities while staying within approved vendor boundaries.

How it works

Vendor opt-out

A tenant administrator can mark one or more model vendors as excluded (for example, excluding Anthropic). Once saved, Guard enforces that preference globally — no request within the tenant will be routed to an excluded vendor.

Tier-preserving substitution

Guard organizes models into capability tiers:

Tier

Characteristics

Frontier

Highest capability; used for complex reasoning tasks

Standard

Balanced capability and latency

Fast

Lowest latency; used for high-throughput or real-time tasks

When a vendor is excluded, Guard selects a replacement model from the same tier offered by a permitted vendor. This preserves the capability and latency characteristics of the original model selection.

Uniform enforcement

The preference is applied centrally. You do not need to revisit individual features or workflows after setting a vendor preference — all AI inference paths in Guard respect the tenant-level configuration automatically.

Configuring vendor preferences

  1. Navigate to Settings → AI Settings in the Guard platform.
  2. Open the Vendor Preferences section.
  3. Select any vendors you want to exclude from your tenant's inference paths.
  4. Save your changes.

The updated preferences take effect immediately for all subsequent AI requests within your tenant.

Considerations

  • Coverage — Vendor preferences apply to all Guard AI features, including the Marcus AI assistant, autonomous pentest workflows, auto-triage, and any other inference-backed capabilities.
  • Tier availability — Guard maintains at least one permitted alternative per tier. If your exclusions would leave a tier without a valid substitute, the platform will surface a warning before saving.
  • Audit trail — Changes to vendor preferences are recorded in the tenant audit log alongside the administrator who made the change and the timestamp.