The pipeline that broke on a Tuesday
In June 2026, Anthropic's Claude was pulled from availability for 20 days in several regions under export-control rules. If you'd built a client's RAG chatbot with a single hard-coded call to anthropic.messages.create(), that client's support bot went dark. Not because the model got worse. Because the vendor got yanked.
We run a small studio building RAG systems for B2B clients, several of them outside the US, and that's the exact scenario we now design against. Not as a hypothetical — as something that already happened to teams who didn't plan for it.
Most RAG chatbot builds get the wrong thing right
When an agency pitches a "RAG chatbot development" project, the demo is always the same: embed some docs, wire up a vector store, call one model, done. It answers questions well in the sales call. Nobody stress-tests what happens when:
