How much oxygen will SAP's new API suck up at Sapphire?

SAP Sapphire kicks off next week and you can expect the usual complement of SAP Business Data Cloud and Joule agentic AI talks, but the customer conversations may revolve around a new API policy.

Yes, SAP will have its usual barrage of updates. SAP has already said it will acquire Dremio, an open data lakehouse player, in a move that aims to use SAP Business Data Cloud combine SAP data with non-SAP data. For good measure, SAP also acquired Prior Labs in a bid to create a flagship European frontier AI lab.

• SAP Sapphire 2026 themes: AI agent accuracy, embedded domain knowledge and processes

But you can also expect SAP’s new API policy to suck up more oxygen at Sapphire than the ERP vendor would like. CEO Christian Klein talked about API access on SAP’s earnings call. Klein had a meaty talk about APIs, customer data and what the vendor will protect. Key quotes include:

• “Customers' data is customers' data and accessing those data, we are not going to charge. But there is a big, big difference now in the cloud world and in the AI world about just accessing the data, which we have no plans to monetize at all versus accessing the IP, the domain know-how sitting in our ERP.”
• “The ontology, the maps, the graphs, this is what we, of course, will actually offer on our platform, but we are going to protect that.”
• “No partner needs to worry as well. I mean we love the partners. We will have an open platform where we also go on, actually SAP agents not coming from SAP.”
• “ We will provide those APIs absolutely clearly. There's only one thing on API, what we already realized. Obviously, when there is mass data egress or millions of calls coming towards an API, we need to start throttling those APIs because otherwise, we are ending up or the customer is ending up in performance issues on the application side.”

And then SAP’s API policy changes landed. DSAG, the German-speaking SAP user group, said the API policies aren’t defined well and are likely to curb customers’ ability to adopt AI innovation.

DSAG noted:

“From DSAG’s perspective, the current announcements are causing uncertainty among customers and partners. From the user’s perspective, for example, this raises the question of whether such projects can even be operated productively and in compliance with guidelines in the future. Changes to API status, usage rights, or supported scenarios must not be made unilaterally or retroactively.”

SAP’s statement on the API policy:

“SAP has announced updates to its data access and API policies to support secure, reliable, and equitable use of shared enterprise platforms as automation and AI-driven access continue to grow. These updates clarify design-intended use of SAP interfaces, align with industry standard cloud practices, help protect system stability and customer data, and provide guidance on supported integration patterns —without changing customer data ownership.”

API policies are going to be a battleground and the issue is only going to become more prevalent as AI agents start traversing enterprise systems.