🧩 Igor Ryabenky highlighted an important issue: most AI startups do not control the infrastructure they rely on.
The situation with restricted access to Claude in the USA clearly demonstrated this. On Polymarket, people are already betting on when access will be restored—alongside forecasts for the World Cup and Bitcoin prices. But for a founder, guessing the next move by Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google is pointless. It's better to spend time reducing the business's dependence on external solutions.
When a provider changes prices, imposes limits, or restricts access, someone else's product solution suddenly becomes part of your roadmap and your headache. Hence the growing interest in open-source, local models, and multi-model architectures: directing tasks to the most suitable model, optimizing costs, and not collapsing if one of the providers fails.
Building a company around a single model, no matter how strong it is today, is rarely a sustainable strategy. Models improve, prices change, access policies are revised. Strong companies always have something deeper under the hood than just access to AI: relationships with clients, their own data and processes, distribution. This remains valuable regardless of which model is inside.
The key question for a founder today is simple: what are you doing to ensure your product does not depend on a single provider?
#ai@rvnikita_blog #anthropic@rvnikita_blog #claude@rvnikita_blog #startups@rvnikita_blog #opensource@rvnikita_blog #igor_ryabenky@rvnikita_blog
