A practical way to avoid LLM vendor lock-in is to separate your application logic from the model provider.

Most teams do this by introducing a model abstraction layer so the system calls a generic interface rather than a specific vendor API. That makes it easier to switch between providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, or open-source models.

It also helps to store prompts, embeddings, and data pipelines independently, and test your workflows across multiple models. Treating LLMs as replaceable infrastructure rather than a hard dependency keeps the architecture flexible as models and pricing change.