What happens if your AI tool goes away?

On 8 June, Apple announced that its rebuilt Siri — the flagship AI feature of this year’s software — would not ship in the European Union with iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. Not delayed until spring. No date at all. Apple’s own words were that it does not currently have a timeline for Siri AI’s availability on iOS and iPadOS in the EU.

The reason had nothing to do with whether the software works. It is a disagreement with the European Commission about the Digital Markets Act and how much access rival assistants must be given to the phone. Tellingly, the same feature is coming to Macs, Watches and Vision Pro in the EU — it is only the phone and the tablet that are blocked, because that is where the argument is. Two large organisations could not agree, so an entire market does not get the feature on its most-used device, and nobody can say for how long.

You are probably reading this from the UK, where none of that applies. Which is exactly why it is worth thinking about.

Availability is now a policy question, not a technical one

For most of the software era, whether you could use a thing depended on whether it had been built and whether you could pay for it. That is no longer reliably true. What a tool can do, and whether you are allowed to have it, have come apart.

The UK is outside the Digital Markets Act, so this particular decision does not touch UK iPhones. But the UK is not outside this pattern. Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, the Competition and Markets Authority designated both Apple and Google as having “strategic market status” in October 2025 — the UK’s own version of the lever the Commission has just pulled. We have the mechanism. It has simply not produced this outcome yet.

And plenty of UK firms are not neatly inside one jurisdiction anyway. If you have staff in Dublin, a client in Berlin or a subsidiary in France, you can end up running the same tool at two different capability levels and explaining to people why their version is worse.

Four ways a tool leaves you

Withdrawal by regulation is only the newest one. In practice a tool stops being available to you in four different ways, and businesses tend to worry about the wrong one.

It never arrives, or it is taken away. The Apple case. Rare, dramatic, entirely outside your control.

The company stops, or is bought. Far more common and far less newsworthy. Small AI companies are being acquired constantly, and the usual outcome is not that the product improves — it is that it is folded into something else, or quietly wound down with a notice period measured in weeks.

The price changes. Not necessarily unfairly. But a tool you built a process around at one price is a different proposition at three times that, and by then leaving is expensive in a way it was not on day one.

The terms change. What the provider does with what you put in, where it is stored, whether it trains on it. This one rarely makes you leave immediately — it just quietly makes the thing you agreed to a different thing.

You cannot predict which of the four will happen, and trying is a waste of an afternoon. What you can do is make any of them cheap.

Six things that make you cheap to move

1. Keep the source of truth outside the tool. Your customer list, your documents, your records should live somewhere you control, with the AI tool reading and writing to it. The moment the only copy of something important exists inside one supplier’s product, that supplier has a say in your business that you did not knowingly give them.

2. Write down the instructions, not just the outputs. The genuinely valuable thing you build with an AI tool is not the answers. It is the accumulated set of instructions — how you want quotes worded, what to do with an awkward email, which things always need a human. That took months to get right and it is completely portable, provided it exists somewhere other than a chat history.

3. Run the export once, and open the file. Not “check there is an export button”. Actually export, actually open it, actually see whether it is usable or a folder of nonsense. An export nobody has ever opened is a promise, not a plan. Fifteen minutes, once a year.

4. Prefer boring formats. Spreadsheets, plain text, ordinary documents, standard image files. A tool that only speaks its own private format is a tool you cannot leave, whatever the contract says.

5. Work out which single tool you would actually be stuck without. Most small businesses have exactly one, and it is usually not the AI one — it is the accounts package, the booking system or the website. Find it, and spend your effort there. Everywhere else you can commit happily.

6. Ask the awkward question before you sign. What happens to my data if you stop trading, if you are bought, or if you withdraw from this market? Ask it in an email, so the answer is in writing. A good supplier will answer plainly. The quality of the answer tells you a great deal about what you are buying.

What argues against all this

Honestly? Portability costs you something real.

The features that make a tool worth paying for are usually the ones that tie you to it most tightly — the deep integration with your calendar, the thing that has learned how your business works. Staying deliberately swappable means passing some of that up, and for a firm of five people the productivity you lose by hedging can easily exceed the risk you are hedging against.

So the rule is not “never commit”. It is proportionality. Insist on portability for the handful of things where losing access would genuinely hurt — customer data, your website, your records, anything you are legally obliged to keep. Everywhere else, where switching would cost you a weekend and a bit of grumbling, go all in and get the benefit. Most tools are in the second category. The mistake is not knowing which is which.

The one question

If your main AI tool became unavailable on Monday — withdrawn, shut down, priced out of reach, take your pick — how long until you were working normally again?

If the answer is a few days, you are fine, and you can stop thinking about it. If the answer is that you genuinely do not know, that is worth an hour this week. Not because the sky is falling: Apple’s row with Brussels will probably be settled, and most tools do not disappear. But the cost of finding out now is an hour, and the cost of finding out on the Monday is your week.

Sources: Apple Newsroom, 8 June 2026, on Siri AI and the Digital Markets Act; Competition and Markets Authority strategic market status designations for Apple and Google, October 2025, made under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. Both checked against the original announcements rather than press coverage.