SAP API Policy Restricts Third-Party AI Tools, Consultants Warn

Walldorf's largest software exporter is at the centre of a quiet but consequential row over what its customers may, and may not, plug into their own SAP data.

Earlier this month SAP published an updated API policy that prohibits using its application programming interfaces "for interaction or integration with semi-autonomous or generative AI systems that plan, select, or execute sequences of API calls" outside SAP-endorsed architectures, data services, or service-specific pathways. The same clause restricts large-scale data extraction and replication.

The German technology trade press picked up the change quickly. Marian Zeis, an independent SAP consultant in Germany, told The Register that the wording is more restrictive than the partner community had anticipated. He warned the policy could affect SAP customers, not just resellers and systems integrators, because the official list of "documented" APIs has historically run behind real customer needs.

"SAP is pretty slow to publish those or improve templates, so we more or less have to rely on undocumented APIs," Zeis said. "Otherwise, we cannot continue developing our applications with our use cases." If developers are restricted to documented endpoints alone, he argued, SAP gains the ability to "govern, monitor, throttle, and control" how customers' systems evolve.

Christof Kerkmann of Handelsblatt reported that the document, last updated on 27 April, appeared to have been published partly by mistake but still contains the contested phrasing. SAP has put both the policy text and a clarifying FAQ in its help section.

In a statement, an SAP spokesperson said the updates are intended to support "secure, reliable, and equitable use of shared enterprise platforms as automation and AI-driven access continue to grow," and to clarify "design-intended use of SAP interfaces" without changing customer data ownership. The company framed the move as routine alignment with cloud industry practice.

Chief executive Christian Klein, on a recent investor call, was more candid about the commercial logic. SAP wants to keep its platform open to third-party AI agents, he said, but felt obliged to throttle bulk API calls that could drag down application performance for paying customers. He also defended what he called the company's domain knowhow, calling the intellectual property in SAP's data model a great asset to protect.

For European companies that have spent the last two years experimenting with retrieval-augmented agents on top of their ERP systems, the question is no longer whether SAP will support such integrations but on what commercial terms. Alisdair Bach, head of the SAP practice at consultancy Dragon ERP, told the same trade press outlet that tighter access could be defended on security grounds, given how aggressively automated agents now probe enterprise endpoints.

The episode lands at an awkward moment for Brussels. The Commission has spent the last year urging European businesses to pick European cloud and AI providers, partly to reduce exposure to US hyperscalers. SAP is the obvious candidate. Yet a policy that locks customers into one vendor's AI roadmap is exactly the kind of friction the EU's data interoperability agenda was meant to remove. The next round of clarifications is expected at SAP's developer event later this quarter.

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