Every so often an AI tool that people rely on simply goes away for a while. A model gets retired. A price jumps overnight. Terms change. And — as happened last year, when the most capable model on the market was pulled from sale for nineteen days while regulators reviewed it — occasionally something bigger steps in and switches it off for everyone, mid-workflow.
If you missed that particular saga, good — it means you weren’t depending on it. But it’s worth five minutes of any owner’s attention, because it’s the clearest demonstration yet of a risk most of us haven’t written down anywhere.
The new weather
No villain, no scandal — just a new kind of weather. The most advanced AI tools now sit close enough to money, safety and national interest that they can be changed or withdrawn at short notice. It has happened, and it will happen again in some form.
Nineteen days is a long time if your quoting, your inbox triage, or your reporting runs through one tool and nothing else.
The businesses that shrugged it off
The ones who barely noticed had something in common: their processes belonged to them, not to the tool. The AI was doing the typing, but the how — the steps, the checks, what “good” looks like — was written down in plain English and could be pointed at a different tool in an afternoon.
Treat any single AI tool like a key supplier: brilliant to have, unwise to depend on without a plan B you’ve actually thought about.
That’s the whole lesson. Not paranoia — portability.
A small, honest next step
Make a short list of the jobs where AI is now load-bearing in your business. For each one, ask: if this exact tool disappeared on Monday, what would we do?
If the answer is “open a different one and paste in the same instructions”, you’re fine — that’s a plan B. If it’s “I don’t know, it’s all in someone’s chat history”, spend an hour writing the process down. The days someone else loses to an outage can be the hour you quietly invested instead.