The AI Vendor Security Questionnaire: 38 Questions Procurement Should Actually Ask
Most AI vendor security questionnaires are SOC 2 templates with two AI questions tacked on. The result is a procurement process that surfaces well-formatted SOC 2 reports while leaving the AI-layer risks unmapped. This article walks through 38 questions that surface what the vendor actually does at the AI request boundary: model coverage, identity context, per-decision audit, policy enforcement, prompt-injection handling, data residency, regulatory alignment, and incident response. The questions assume the vendor is supplying an AI-using service, not a model. Each question includes the answer pattern a defensible vendor produces and the answer pattern that should trigger a deeper review.