Many of us working with databases know the problems of a single point of failure. We build HA/DR technologies into a lot of systems precisely because many of us know if the database goes down, a lot of stuff goes down. Broken software is easier to fix and rollback, but a broken database can be a much bigger problems.

We also know an overloaded server doesn't handle a workload well, hence our quest for well-written SQL code, but we often lose that battle with developers.

In any case, as we move to a world where AI technology is used by many organizations, who often have a contract with a vendor to provide services, there is a potential issue. Imagine that you've setup workflows, maybe agentic loads and you depend on a company, say Anthropic, to provide those services. What if your organization gets banned?

That happened to a company (reported on Reddit). A user got a note from Anthropic, but his entire organization got banned. That's quite a dependency where a user in your company could cause an issue.

In some sense, that's like someone in your company sending an email that gets your organization's email blacklisted or has Google/Microsoft/etc. cutting off access. Imagine the disruption there?

Some of these companies providing AI services aren't that large, and aren't suited for the enterprise. Some of you are using vendors that might be contracting with these AI firms. Imagine your monitoring, DevOps, etc. vendor suddenly not working because they lost access to their AI services?

I'd like to assume this doesn't happen with the very large cloud vendors, but who knows. I'd like to think that not only enterprises, but even smaller companies don't lose access because of the actions of one person. Or if they do, there's any way way to get a response from customer service, but I also know that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have made it harder to get an answer from a real person.

I didn't talk about this recently when presenting on local AI models, but I the future might be companies having more control over their AI tech, running them the same way we run servers in the cloud, in an IaaS, more responsible, but more controllable way.