AI Dependency: the risk of betting everything on a SaaS

Imagine that half of your operation runs on top of an AI tool. Support, proposals, reports, all of it goes through it. Then, on some random Tuesday, you get a notice: access to the new model now depends on approval from a foreign government. This is not fiction. OpenAI announced that the US government will decide who can use GPT-5.6, its most advanced model. And that changes the conversation about AI dependency for any business owner.

You don't need to understand international politics to feel the problem. If the most important piece of your automation can be switched on or off by someone you will never meet, you don't have a supplier. You have an owner.

What actually happened

The news is simple to sum up. OpenAI is going to release GPT-5.6 in a controlled way. Before granting access to certain customers, it will run them through a check by the US government. The official reason is national security: very powerful models could be used for dangerous things.

It makes sense from their side. The problem is the precedent. A private company, owner of the tool that became infrastructure for millions of businesses, now accepts that a government decides who gets in and who stays out.

For a studio in the US this is a bureaucratic detail. For you, in Brazil, it's an uncomfortable question: if tomorrow the "approved" list changes, are you in or out?

A supplier you can swap. An owner you obey.

Why this is your problem, even if you never use GPT-5.6

You might be thinking: "Diego, I don't even use the expensive version. I use the basic plan to write a few texts." Fair. But the point is not GPT-5.6 specifically. It's the pattern it reveals.

Every time you put a third-party tool at the heart of your business, you accept its rules. And those rules change without asking you. I've seen this happen many times, far from any headline about AI:

• A client built her entire sales funnel inside an automation platform. The platform tripled the price. She paid, because migrating would cost even more.
• A restaurant relied on a delivery app for 80% of its orders. The app changed the commission. The profit evaporated overnight.
• A small e-commerce used an AI extension for product descriptions. The extension was discontinued. Two thousand descriptions turned to pumpkins.

None of these cases made the Washington Post. But the pain is identical: you built on your neighbor's land, and the neighbor decided to put up a fence.

AI dependency is not bad. Blind dependency is

Here I need to be honest with you, because it would be easy to sell fear. Using AI from suppliers like OpenAI, Google or Anthropic is great. I use it every day. Could you build a model like that on your own? No. Neither could I, nor almost anyone. Outsourcing that is smart.

The mistake is not using it. The mistake is using it in a way that leaves you hostage. There is a huge difference between these two situations:

1. AI is an engine you can swap. If a supplier goes down or gets expensive, you plug in another one in an afternoon.
2. AI is the foundation of the house. If it falls, the house falls with it, and you have nowhere to run.

The first is healthy dependency. The second is a time bomb. And most of the companies I work with started on the second without noticing, because nobody stops to design this before they start using it.

How not to get stuck

Good news: you can use the full power of AI without handing over the keys to your business. It's not about distrusting everything. It's about architecture, about how you connect the pieces. Some principles I apply in projects:

Separate what is yours from what is rented. Your data, your flows and your business rules stay in a place you control. AI comes in as a service plugged in from the outside, not as the owner of the house. If you need to swap it, you swap the piece, not the whole structure.

Don't marry a single supplier. Today there's something called an AI "gateway", a layer in the middle that talks to several models at once. If OpenAI changes the rules, you redirect to Google or another one without rewriting your system. It's like having more than one energy supplier.

Keep the history. Those two thousand product descriptions that vanished? They wouldn't have vanished if they were saved in the client's own database. AI generates, but the result is yours. Always.

Have a manual plan B. Simple question: if the tool goes down for three days, do you stop or keep going? If the answer is "I stop", you need a plan B before you scale the dependency, not after.

None of this requires a team of ten people. It requires someone thinking about the structure beforehand, and not patching things up after the problem already knocked on the door.

What I would do in your place

If I owned a business today, with AI running in some corner of the operation, I would do a ten-minute exercise. Grab paper and list: which third-party tools hold some important part of your daily routine? Next to each one, write what happens if it disappears tomorrow.

The ones you could replace in an afternoon, great, leave them be. The ones that would leave you stuck for days, those are your real risk. Not because they will definitely disappear, but because you have no control over the decision.

The GPT-5.6 story is just the loudest reminder of an old truth: whoever controls the tool controls whoever depends on it. AI is wonderful when you use it as a tool. It becomes a trap when you use it as a crutch.

If you want to make the most of AI and automation in a way that strengthens your business, and not one that ties you to a supplier abroad, this is exactly the kind of thing I help set up. Structure designed to be yours, not rented. See who I am and how I work.

Here's the post:

Half your business could be switched off by someone you'll never meet.

OpenAI just announced the US government will decide who gets access to GPT-5.6, their most advanced model. A private tool that became infrastructure for millions of businesses now answers to a government approval list.

Here's the uncomfortable part: this isn't really about GPT-5.6. It's the pattern. Every time you put a third-party tool at the heart of your operation, you accept rules that change without asking you. A supplier you can swap. An owner you obey.

Using AI is smart. Building your whole house on rented ground is not. Keep your data and your flows in a place you control, plug AI in from the outside, and never marry a single supplier.

Quick exercise: list every tool that holds part of your daily routine. Next to each, write what happens if it disappears tomorrow. The ones that would leave you stuck for days? That's your real risk.

If you want to use AI in a way that strengthens your business instead of tying it to someone abroad, that's exactly what I help set up.

#AIStrategy #TechIndependence #DigitalTransformation #BusinessResilience #Automation