You don't own the AI: you own the process that insures your business
On 12 June 2026 Anthropic switched off its own most capable AI models, Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for every business on the planet with about 90 minutes notice. A US export control order meant the company could not tell which users were based where, so pulling both models entirely was the only way to comply. Firms that had quietly wired those models into daily operations woke up locked out, for 19 days, through no fault of their own.
That’s the risk nobody puts in a marketing proposal: the AI tool writing your ad copy is rented, not owned — and so is the one scoring your leads and sending your follow-up emails.
It can vanish for reasons that have nothing to do with your business, and when it does, what survives isn’t the tool — it’s the documented process sitting underneath it.
Building that process is the real insurance policy a local business needs, so get it right before you hand any more of your marketing over to AI.
Nineteen days with no model and no warning
The suspension was not a billing dispute or a bug. Amazon researchers had reported a jailbreak technique against one of Fable 5’s safeguards.
The export control directive that followed barred access to any foreign national. For the businesses affected, the cause barely mattered.
What actually mattered was simpler than that: a tool they’d built their processes around was gone by the next morning.
As Forbes contributor Robert Szczerba put it at the time, the model a business depends on can disappear overnight. The reasons sit entirely outside that business’s control. Access came back on 30 June, after a full 19 day blackout.
Your insurer already worked this out
Standard business liability cover is catching up faster than most owners realise. Since 2026, insurers have begun excluding claims tied to AI outputs from cover altogether. They are telling policyholders the results are too unpredictable to underwrite.
That leaves a gap, and if the tool fails or disappears, your insurer may not be the one to pick up the pieces.
Which brings us back to where this article opened: the AI isn’t the asset, the process is.
Get in touch today for a free paid search audit and see exactly how much of your lead generation depends on one tool staying switched on.
Systemising PPC so no platform can black box you
The usual advice is to pick the best AI tool out there and get good at using it, but that misses the point.
Tools change hands, change price and get switched off — the rules you run them by don’t.
Pay-per-click platforms lean harder on automated AI bidding every year, and most agencies just switch it on and hope.
We do it differently: every account we manage runs on written bidding rules, consistent naming conventions and an audit trail of every change we make, and why we made it.
In our experience, the firms that panic during an outage are the ones with nothing written down. Picture a Greenock tradesman whose enquiry follow-up lives inside one AI tool.
Take that tool away and he doesn’t know who to ring, or when. The business down the road, with the same tool but a written process behind it, just picks up the phone.
That’s not extra admin — it’s the insurance.
If a platform quietly changes how its bidding AI behaves, the account doesn’t go dark, because the rules controlling it live in our documentation, not inside the platform’s black box.
The sequence you own outlasts the AI writing it
The same logic applies to email — AI tools are genuinely useful for drafting nurture copy.
But the sequence itself is a different thing: the triggers, the timing and the rule for what happens when a lead goes quiet all belong to you.
Write them down and own them — don’t leave them locked inside whichever AI writing tool happens to be fashionable this year.
Keith Malone spent more than 40 years in sales and marketing before founding OMG. He has run businesses since the 1980s, and the family has lived in Greenock, on the banks of the Clyde, since 2019.
His point about the industry is a blunt one: firms spend heavily on advertising, then leave real money on the table through poor systems and follow-up that never happens.
Swap the AI tool generating the words for a different one tomorrow and a documented sequence keeps working just fine. Lose the sequence itself, though, and it won’t matter which AI wrote the last email.
What OMG actually sells is the process
This is why OMG is built around a documented, pay-per-lead process, not a retainer for generic activity.
Every client sits under the Double Your Money Guarantee. For every £1 you invest, we work to return at least £2 in revenue. If that has not happened yet, we keep working at no extra cost until it has.
That guarantee only holds up because we’re accountable for the process, not for any single AI tool — which is really Keith’s own philosophy in a nutshell: no upfront costs, no empty promises, just results.
Results come from a system that still runs on day 20 of an outage nobody saw coming. Book your qualifying call today and we will show you which parts of your lead generation are already systemised, and which parts are one vendor decision away from going dark.
Nineteen days without Fable 5 and Mythos 5 was a preview, not a one off. A rented tool can disappear that fast.
The businesses that kept moving were the ones who’d already written down the process, with the AI only ever executing it on their behalf. Systemise the process first, and the next AI outage becomes a footnote in your business rather than a crisis.
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