Negotiate the route-loss contract early.

Video caption

Negotiate the route-loss contract early.

An export is useful only if decisions can be reconstructed.

Notice, portability, fallback capacity and ownership.

My rule: The process should survive a route change without lost work.

#EricFieldNotes

Full written post / accessibility read

When a model provider becomes part of a core process, procurement should ask what happens if policy, access, model availability or data terms change. The provider may have valid reasons to change its service. The buyer still needs a plan for open work and customer obligations.

A company may export inputs but lose the version, routing reason or reviewer state that explains each pending case. Moving to another provider then risks reprocessing old work inconsistently. The handoff needs evidence, not just files.

Ask how rule changes are communicated, whether decision and input evidence can be exported, what alternate capacity is actually authorized, and who handles queued cases during a transition. Run a small route-loss exercise before the contract becomes a business dependency.

Set a maximum unresolved age and verify no case closes without an authorized decision. Do this because the economic risk is not merely losing an API key; it is losing the ability to account for the business work behind it.

#EricFieldNotes

Four-beat scene transcript

1. Negotiate the route-loss contract early.

When a model provider becomes part of a core process, procurement should ask what happens if policy, access, model availability or data terms change. The provider may have valid reasons to change its service. The buyer still needs a plan for open work and customer obligations.

Visual: A critical workflow cannot rely on a single quiet assumption.

2. The missing term is the unfinished queue.

A company may export inputs but lose the version, routing reason or reviewer state that explains each pending case. Moving to another provider then risks reprocessing old work inconsistently. The handoff needs evidence, not just files.

Visual: An export is useful only if decisions can be reconstructed.

3. Specify four continuity questions.

Ask how rule changes are communicated, whether decision and input evidence can be exported, what alternate capacity is actually authorized, and who handles queued cases during a transition. Run a small route-loss exercise before the contract becomes a business dependency.

Visual: Notice, portability, fallback capacity and ownership.

4. Measure continuity by accepted cases.

Set a maximum unresolved age and verify no case closes without an authorized decision. Do this because the economic risk is not merely losing an API key; it is losing the ability to account for the business work behind it.

Visual: The process should survive a route change without lost work.

Research and claim limits

• OpenAI Usage Policies (S133)
• Anthropic Usage Policy update (S134)

The examples identified as illustrative or simulated are design probes, not reported incidents. Vendor specifications do not establish workload performance.