US government pulled two Claude models offline for 18 days

This wasn't a company decision — a government export-control directive took a frontier model off the table overnight, for every user outside the US, with no warning and no opt-out. It stayed off for 18 days before Commerce lifted the order on 30 June, with access restored from 1 July. If anything you've built leans on one model as its only option, that's the real risk — not the model going out of date. The fix is boring: know which model you fall back to, and make sure the switch doesn't need a human standing by.