An AI company asked for API access to your platform: what to consider

What kind of access is the AI company asking for?#

An AI company asking for API access usually wants one of three things: to act inside your platform on behalf of a shared customer, to pull data in bulk to train or evaluate a model, or to build a joint product. Each has a different data owner and a different approval path, so the first reply should be a question about which one it is.

Requests often blur these lines. An integration that starts as an agent helping a customer may arrive with a clause letting the AI company use interaction data to improve its models, which quietly turns a customer-directed integration into a training data deal.

Whose data would flow through the API?#

The data flowing through a platform API is usually your customers' data, held under contracts that limit how you may use and share it. Many SaaS companies act as a processor or service provider for that content, which generally means acting on the customer's instructions rather than their own.

Read the master subscription agreement, the data processing addendum and your privacy policy before discussing scope. Look for the definition of customer data, any aggregated or usage data clause, limits on sub-processors and onward transfer, and confidentiality terms. Enterprise customers often negotiate tighter terms than your standard paper, so check those contracts one by one.

Your own records are a separate question. Support conversations, engineering history and internal documents may be licensable on their own terms, after rights review and privacy preparation, without opening a live connection into customer accounts.

The checklist before you answer#

The checklist below covers what the CTO, general counsel and CEO should be able to answer together before any credential is issued. An unanswered item is a reason to pause, not a detail to settle after launch.

• 1Whose data: which customers, objects and fields would the API return?
• 2Authorization: who approves access, you, each customer or both, and where is that recorded?
• 3Permitted use: serving users, evaluation, fine-tuning, pretraining or product analytics, and which are excluded.
• 4Training rights: whether returned data or outputs may train or improve any model, including future ones.
• 5Retention and deletion: how long pulled data, prompts and outputs are kept, and how deletion is certified.
• 6Derived artifacts: embeddings, indexes, synthetic data and model weights built from your data.
• 7Onward sharing: sub-licensing, affiliates, contractors and cloud providers.
• 8Scopes and rate limits: read-only scopes, per-tenant tokens, volume caps and a documented kill switch.
• 9Security and audit: logging, breach notice, audit rights and the security review you require of integrators.
• 10Attribution: how your name and your customers' names may appear in the AI company's product and marketing.
• 11Revenue terms: fee basis, minimums, revenue share and who pays for the engineering work.
• 12Termination: notice, treatment of data already pulled, survival of restrictions and evidence of deletion.

Training rights need their own clause#

Training rights need their own clause because the other protections in an API agreement do not reach them. A model trained on your data keeps what it learned after the key is revoked and the files are deleted.

Define each use precisely. Inference means using data to answer a request in the moment; evaluation means testing a model without changing it; fine-tuning and pretraining change the model itself. A clause permitting use to improve services can be read to include training, so name each use and state whether it is allowed. Ask how the AI company separates your data from other sources and what it can actually delete.

Large platforms have started writing this into their own API terms, which shows the direction of travel. Slack's API Terms state that a provider of an application offered outside its own organization may not use API Data to train a large language model, and may not bulk export Slack message and file data unless an additional agreement expressly allows it. ENR reported in November 2025 that Procore's terms now say marketplace partners cannot bulk-download platform data for commercial purposes, including training large language models. Review your own API terms against the same questions.

If training is on the table at all, it should be a separate, explicit grant covering records you have the right to license, not a side effect of an integration that carries customer content.

Engineering controls that back up the contract#

Engineering controls make contract terms enforceable in practice. Dedicated credentials, narrow read-only scopes, per-customer authorization, sensible rate limits and full request logging let you see whether actual usage matches what was agreed.

Illustrative: a bid management software company weighs a request#

Illustrative: a fictional software company that runs bid management for commercial subcontractors receives an email from an AI startup building an estimating agent. The startup asks for API access to project, bid and message data across all customer accounts, offering a revenue share on agent subscriptions.

The CTO maps the request against the checklist. The data is customer content under a processing addendum, the startup's draft terms allow use to improve its models, and it wants an admin-level token. General counsel confirms the customer contracts do not permit that use without each customer's consent.

The company declines bulk access and offers its standard integration instead: each customer opts in, scopes are read-only, training on returned data is excluded and deletion is certified at termination. Separately, leadership starts a review of the company's own support and engineering history, which it controls and could assess for licensing without touching customer accounts.

How SourceX approaches API requests from AI developers#

SourceX works on the second half of that example: licensing a company's own operational records, such as support conversations, issue histories and code review records, under a defined license. Customer content held as a processor is generally outside that scope unless the rights clearly allow it.

The SourceX five-step transaction runs Supply, Rights, Preparation, Approval and Delivery, with the supplier approving each step and nothing shared during the initial assessment. The SourceX Evidence Packet records provenance, licensing rights, permitted use, the privacy record and release authorization, giving a written answer to the questions an API request tends to leave open.