When Anthropic pulled its Fable 5 model from international use for nearly three weeks, some enterprises scrambled. Liberty Mutual, a 114-year-old property and casualty insurer, did not. The company easily switched to other platforms, having built a flexible “AI backbone” 18 months earlier specifically to weather such disruptions.
The architecture comprises roughly 50 components spanning security, identity, orchestration, tool restriction, and the policies governing agent behavior. Each element is designed to be swapped independently. The control plane remains proprietary, while the underlying models and vendors are interchangeable.
“Things are changing so fast, you need a backbone that's flexible,” Brian Craig, Liberty Mutual’s senior director of architecture, said at a recent VB Impact event. “You can't lock in right now on one vendor or even one framework.” He emphasized that enterprises should focus on what they can feel confident about for the next six months rather than chasing the “flavor of the day.”
The approach signals a shift away from single-vendor lock-in toward modular, multi-model orchestration. In a landscape where major model releases can be abruptly withdrawn or deprecated, Liberty Mutual’s strategy suggests that architectural independence is becoming a competitive advantage for large enterprises.
However, building such a backbone requires significant upfront investment in custom middleware and governance tooling—a luxury not every business can afford. Smaller firms may still rely on deeply integrated vendor stacks, making them more vulnerable to sudden model retirements.