Your AI provider may not be your biggest dependency. Their government is.

Most companies evaluate AI providers based on model quality, pricing, latency, and features.

What if the most important factor is none of those?

A recent government order forced an AI provider to withdraw access to a newly released model just days after launch.

Overnight, companies building products and workflows on top of it lost access.

No contract negotiation.
No migration period.
No appeal process.

The event highlights something many businesses still treat as a theoretical risk:

When your AI infrastructure is controlled by a closed-model provider in another jurisdiction, your actual dependency may not be the provider itself.

It may be the government that can regulate it.

For years, we talked about vendor lock-in.

Now we're entering a world where geopolitical lock-in may matter just as much.

The companies most exposed aren't necessarily the ones using the most AI.

They're the ones treating a single AI provider as permanent infrastructure.

Should AI providers be treated like cloud vendors — with redundancy and failover plans from day one — or is that overengineering for most startups?

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