The Day They Switched Off the AI
The most powerful AI model in the world got switched off on a Friday night. Not because it broke. Because the government sent a letter.
On June 12, the Commerce Department told Anthropic that its two newest models could no longer be touched by any foreign national, anywhere, including the company’s own foreign-born staff. There was no clean way to block just those people, so Anthropic shut the models off for everyone. One letter, and a tool that hundreds of millions of people used went dark overnight.
I want to talk about what that means for you, because it isn’t what the headlines said.
The headlines treated it like the end of the world. It wasn’t. A more powerful model went on hold for a while. It’ll come back, or it won’t, and either way most people’s work continues on any of a dozen other tools. The story got loud because loud earns clicks. That’s not a conspiracy, it’s just how every story works now. Somebody has to put a spike in there to raise your blood pressure, or you scroll past.
The boring fact underneath the noise is the part worth keeping. A tool a lot of people depended on got turned off by someone they’ll never meet, in a room they’ll never enter, for reasons they didn’t get a vote on. And that should make you ask a quiet, uncomfortable question about your own setup.
If your business runs on an AI tool, you don’t own that tool. You rent it.
When you subscribe to Claude or ChatGPT or any of them, you’re renting access. Same as Netflix. Same as your phone plan. The company can change the price, change the rules, retire the model you like, or shut the whole thing down, and you get a say in exactly none of it.
I’ve watched this happen in small ways for a while now. I’ve used older Claude models that simply went away. One day they were there, the next day I’d been moved to something newer whether I asked for it or not. In my case the new ones were better, so I came out ahead. But that was luck, not control. The company decided. I went along because I had no other choice.
I pay two hundred dollars a month for the top Claude plan. I use it hard, and I get real value out of it. I’m not complaining about the price or the product. But I’m clear-eyed about what I’m actually buying. Not a tool. Permission to use a tool, and permission can be pulled.
I learned that lesson the expensive way, years before any of this AI business. I had platforms terminate my accounts and wipe out work I’d spent real time building. Nobody asked. Nobody warned me. One day it was there, the next day the login stopped working and there was no human on the other end to argue with. If you’ve ever had an account frozen overnight, you know the specific feeling. You built something on top of a service, and the service decided you were done.
So I run one rule now, and I don’t break it. Never wire a tool you don’t own into the guts of your business.
There’s a real difference between using AI as a tool and baking AI into your product. Using it as a tool is safe. I prompt Claude to help me draft something, and if Claude vanished tomorrow I’d open something else and lose nothing but an afternoon. Baking it in is the dangerous version. If your website calls a specific AI model every time someone loads a page, and that model’s company changes its prices or its terms or its whole business overnight, your site breaks and your customers are the ones who tell you.
The fix is old and unglamorous. Keep your own work at the center. Your own books, your own site, your own voice, your own list of the people who read you. Treat every outside service as a part you can swap out. Use AI to help build your platform. Never let AI be the platform.
A lot of smart people are pouring their content and their authority into these tools right now, and that’s fine, as long as the foundation underneath is theirs. The trouble starts when the rented thing becomes the load-bearing wall. Then somebody else’s Friday-night decision becomes your Monday-morning emergency.
Staying free is harder than it sounds, because the easy path always runs toward getting locked in. Every shortcut you take inside one platform is a small chain you’ll have to cut later. The specialized workflow that only works in one tool. The export you keep meaning to do and never do. The audience that lives entirely on a platform you don’t control. None of it feels like a risk until the day it does.
This won’t be the last switch that gets flipped. The tension between governments and companies and the people who use these tools is just getting started, and it only runs one direction once it starts. Friendly governments and hostile ones, friendly companies and hostile ones, all of them fighting over who’s allowed to touch what. The people who come through fine will be the ones who never confused renting with owning.
So here’s the question I’d actually sit with. If the tool you lean on most disappeared tomorrow, would you still have a business? Or would you have a very expensive habit and a login that stopped working?
Be honest about the answer. Then go build the wall.
I wrote a longer version of this, with the full breakdown of the shutdown and how I structure my own setup so no single service can take me down, over on my site.
I write about ghostwriting, owning your work, and thinking clearly about the tools we all depend on. If that’s your kind of thing, subscribe and the next one lands in your inbox. And if you’re sitting on a book that should carry your name and live on a platform nobody can switch off, that’s the work I do.