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What’s Your AI Backup Plan?
When your engineering team depends on AI, what happens when the AI company becomes the problem?
I don’t know if tech has always been this weird or if I’m just paying attention, but there’s been enough shocks to the AI system that I have a question. To all my fellow engineering leaders, I must ask: What’s your AI backup plan?
As of October 2026, Anthropic is still a supply chain risk with implications for any government work. Grok had a pretty dark period there for a while and, even with Grok Bots’ success, I’m not sure it has gained back all the lost trust. OpenAI has had its share of PR nightmares after taking government dollars to weaponize GPT. Heck, say “data center” and watch the angry mob form.
AI is by far the single most impressive technological achievement in software creation since debugging, but wow is it a volatile cocktail of politics and emotion. And social media commentary.
So again, engineering leaders, what’s your backup plan? Local models? Open weight? Chinese? Throwing your hands up in the air?
I was going to bring AI home. Then I looked at the price.
Earlier this week over on LinkedIn, I mentioned that after being fed up with alarmist rhetoric coming…
