# Vendor Risk Assessment Agent

> A vendor-risk agent that scores third parties on security, compliance, and data access from evidence, flags missing certs and DPAs, and recommends a tier.

- **Category:** Compliance & Risk
- **Difficulty:** Advanced
- **Setup time:** 50 min
- **Stacks:** Claude, LangGraph, OpenAI
- **Version:** 2.0.0 (updated 2026-06-21)
- **Source:** https://agent-kits.com/kit/vendor-risk-assessor

## Overview

Profiles a vendor across security, compliance, financial, and data-access domains, scoring risk against your criteria.

Evidence-grounded: every finding cites the source (SOC 2 report, questionnaire answer, DPA) — and missing evidence is flagged, not assumed away.

Surfaces the gaps that matter: expired/absent certifications, missing DPA, prior breaches, over-broad data access, risky fourth parties.

Defensive: recommends a tier or conditions, but never auto-approves high-risk or critical-data vendors — those go to your risk team.

## When to use it

- You onboard or periodically review many third-party vendors and the first pass (collecting and checking evidence) eats analyst time.
- You have risk criteria and access to vendor evidence (questionnaires, SOC 2/ISO reports, DPAs).
- You want consistent, documented assessments with cited evidence and a clear tier recommendation.
- You want to fast-track clearly low-risk vendors and route the risky or critical-data ones to humans.

## When not to use it

- You expect it to be the final approval or to make a legal/contractual determination — those stay with humans.
- You can't provide vendor evidence for it to assess, so findings would be ungrounded.
- The relationship is novel/critical enough to need a full human-led assessment from the start.
- You can't keep risk-team review on high-risk and critical-data vendors.

## Architecture

- **Vendor intake** — Collects the vendor profile and the proposed relationship — what product, what data it will access, and the business context — to frame the assessment.
- **Evidence ingestion** — Pulls and parses the available evidence: security questionnaire, SOC 2/ISO reports, DPA, pen-test summaries, and breach history.
- **Domain analysis** — Assesses security, compliance, data access/scope, financial stability, and breach history, citing the evidence and noting missing items as explicit gaps.
- **Risk scoring** — Weights domain ratings by data sensitivity and access scope to produce an overall risk level grounded in the evidence.
- **Escalation gate** — A deterministic gate sends moderate/high risk, critical-data access, or missing-key-evidence vendors to the risk team; only clearly low-risk vendors can be fast-tracked.
- **Recommendation & conditions** — Produces a tier recommendation with required remediation conditions and a cited rationale for a human decision.
- **Register & monitoring** — Writes the assessment to the vendor register with evidence and review date, supporting periodic re-assessment and audit.

## Files in this bundle

- `system-prompt.md` — the agent's system prompt
- `tools.json` — tool/function definitions the agent expects
- `workflow.md` — step-by-step run loop
- `.env.example` — environment variables to fill in
- `kit.json` — full structured metadata
- `starters/` — minimal starter snippets
- `LICENSE` — Apache-2.0 (code, configuration, and schema)
- `LICENSE-CONTENT` — CC BY 4.0 (specification text and documentation)
- `NOTICE` — attribution and trademark notice
- `run.py` — **runnable demo**: real agent loop with mock tools (`pip install anthropic`, set `ANTHROPIC_API_KEY`, `python run.py`)
- `agentaz.json` / `agentaz.schema.json` — AgentAz™ governance spec + schema

## Implementation notes

- Make 'missing evidence is a finding' a hard rule: an absent DPA, expired SOC 2, or unanswered question is an explicit gap, never an assumed-present control.
- Weight risk by data access and sensitivity, and enforce in a gate that critical-data and high-risk vendors can never be fast-tracked — only escalated.
- Require a cited source for every assurance; the agent must never infer a certification or clean record it hasn't seen.
- Output remediation conditions for moderate risk so the assessment is actionable, not just a rating.
- Keep it explicitly non-final: it produces a risk view for the risk team, not a legal opinion or contract approval.
- Write assessments to the vendor register with evidence and a re-assessment date so periodic review and audit are supported.
- Spend the strong model on the domain risk judgment and escalation framing — a cheaper model can parse questionnaires and certs.

## Variations

- **Basic — Evidence-cited risk reviewer:** Assesses a vendor across domains from provided evidence and returns cited findings, gaps, and a recommended tier for an analyst. No auto-approval.
- **Advanced — Gated first-pass assessor:** Adds data-sensitivity weighting, an escalation gate for high-risk/critical-data/evidence-gap vendors, and remediation-condition generation for conditional cases.
- **Enterprise — Governed TPRM automation:** Adds register/evidence-store integration, multi-framework criteria, fourth-party mapping, full audit trails, periodic re-assessment scheduling, and tuning from risk-team outcomes.

## FAQ

**Does it approve vendors?**

No. It produces a first-pass, evidence-based risk assessment and a tier recommendation; a human makes the final call. Clearly low-risk vendors can be recommended for fast-tracking, but high-risk and critical-data vendors are escalated, never auto-approved.

**How does it avoid giving false assurance?**

Every finding must cite a source it actually reviewed. If evidence for a control is missing, expired, or unanswered, it's flagged as a gap — it never infers a certification or clean record it hasn't seen.

**How is risk weighted?**

By what the vendor will access. A vendor touching sensitive or customer data, or critical systems, is treated as inherently higher risk and held to stronger evidence than a low-touch tool.

**What does it do with a risky or incomplete vendor?**

It rates the domains from the evidence, lists the gaps, and escalates to your risk team with the findings — or, for remediable moderate-risk cases, recommends conditions (e.g. obtain a DPA, current SOC 2) before onboarding.

**Is it a legal or final approval?**

No. It's a risk view to support the decision, not a legal opinion or contract sign-off, and every output is marked as not-final-approval.

**How does it support periodic review?**

It writes each assessment with cited evidence and a re-assessment date to your vendor register, so reviews can be scheduled and the trail is auditable.


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© 2026 AgentKits · www.agent-kits.com

**Open source.** Code, configuration, and the AgentAz™ schema are licensed under
**Apache-2.0**; specification text and documentation under **CC BY 4.0** (with
attribution to AgentKits, link to https://www.agent-kits.com). See LICENSE, LICENSE-CONTENT,
and NOTICE in this bundle. "AgentAz" and "AgentKits" are trademarks of AgentKits.

**Flagship reference blueprint.** View the source, AgentAz™ spec, and frozen v1.0 schema
in the public registry: https://github.com/agent-kits/agentaz
Original: https://agent-kits.com/kit/vendor-risk-assessor
