Who Picked the Model? Governing Automatic Model Selection in Enterprise AI

Model selection used to be a procurement decision: made once, by named people, with a contract behind it. In 2026 it became a runtime decision, made per request by a router on cost, latency and availability signals, with nothing behind it but a policy nobody owns.

This paper separates the rules a router must obey (obligation, sovereignty, action class, fitness) from the signals it may optimize, names the record every call must leave behind — selection provenance — and argues that the router, not the model, is the new concentration point to engineer an exit from. Companion to The AI Gateway Advantage (Revision 2). Part of the Sovereign Digital Resilience series.