One vendor anchors three quarters of cross-institutional AI dependencies in regulated financial services.
In a population of 543 regulated financial institutions, one canonical vendor mediates 73.4 percent of all observed cross-institutional AI dependencies. The same vendor anchors 62.2 percent of the population and reaches every one of the twelve sectors covered. The single point of failure is structural, not incidental.
The cumulative coverage curve plots the share of cross-institutional pairs bridged as vendors are added one at a time, ranked by reach. The first vendor alone captures 73.4 percent. By the third vendor, coverage exceeds 88 percent. By the tenth, 98 percent. The remaining sixty-five vendors collectively account for less than two percent. The dashed diagonal shows what perfect equality would look like, where each vendor contributes one seventy-fifth of the total. The actual curve sits far above it. The concentration is not gentle; it is structural.