What the AI seat price buys, and where the controls sit

Six controls, four vendors: the lowest plan that gives you each one

Where the pattern holds, and where it breaks

OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral follow the same shape. The audit log and automatic provisioning arrive on Enterprise. OpenAI and Anthropic put sign-on and a no-training default on their entry business plans; Mistral keeps both on Enterprise. Two of the three, OpenAI and Mistral, don’t publish an Enterprise price at all.

Microsoft inverts it. Identity, provisioning and a 180-day audit log come with the business plans, because they ride on Entra ID and Microsoft Purview, which the customer already licenses. The step up is agent governance: the Agent 365 add-on, or the E7 plan that bundles it with Copilot.

Mistral is the residency outlier. Its data sits in the EU by default on every plan, and Enterprise customers can run it on-premises. For a European subsidiary or a regulated client, that row can matter more than the price row.

Anthropic’s residency answer runs through other clouds. Its own hosting offers US-only processing on usage-based Enterprise. European or Asia-Pacific residency means buying Claude through Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI or Microsoft Foundry.

Before you buy: four questions for the vendor

1. Which plan do we need for an audit log we can export, and how long is it kept?
2. When someone leaves, how are they removed: automatically through our identity provider, or by hand?
3. Who in our company can switch on agents and connect them to our systems, and can we limit that by role?
4. Where is our data stored and processed, and does that change on the plan we’re quoting?

If the answer to any of them is “a higher plan”, that plan is the real price of the agent.

Disputed or recently changed

These cells conflict between the vendor’s own pages, or changed in 2026. The table shows the more specific or more recent page.

• Mistral, single sign-on. The admin documentation says SAML single sign-on needs Enterprise. One help article implies Team admins have single sign-on too.
• Mistral, product names. Le Chat was renamed Mistral Vibe in August 2026, and La Plateforme is now Mistral Studio. Older pages still use the former names.
• Mistral, training default on Team. Enterprise is opted out of training by default. No default is published for Team; admins can switch training off for the organisation.
• OpenAI, data retention on Business. The enterprise privacy page says Business workspace admins control retention. The pricing page lists custom retention for Enterprise only.
• OpenAI, data residency on Business. The pricing page shows no residency on Business. A Business release note from April 2026 adds Japan residency for some synced apps.
• OpenAI, agent products. Agent Builder shuts down on 30 November 2026, and custom GPTs are being retired in favour of plugins.
• Anthropic, role-based permissions. The pricing page places role-based access on Enterprise. The Team plan article lists role-based permissioning for Team.
• Microsoft, Agent 365 eligibility. The pages differ on which base plans Agent 365 attaches to: E5, Business Premium, or bought on its own at $15.
• Microsoft, Copilot Business price. $21 per user, with an $18 promotion for the first year on purchases between 1 July and 31 December 2026.