• UK-based business owner Sean McDonnell relies on AI for his web design business and SaaS website.
• The White House ordered Anthropic to cut foreign access to Fable 5 while McDonell was mid-task.
• McDonnell emphasizes importance of backup plans due to AI tool disruptions like the Fable incident.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sean McDonnell, 43, who lives in England. McDonnell is the founder of the web design company Kaizen and the SaaS website Consigns. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Developing my website would not have been possible without AI.

I started my web design business earlier this year, which also led me to create a website that provides software to help companies track their waste. I run both of these ventures with my partner, and we enlist contractors for some operations and software development.

We're a small team, and AI tools are a big help. Last week, I saw a few posts online showing the amazing things that Anthropic's new Fable model can do.

I was keen to try this new technology, but didn't get much of a chance to use it. A few hours in, I was mid-task when the US government forced Anthropic to cut off foreign access to Fable with little to no notice.

The rug got pulled from under me pretty quickly, but because I was well-prepared, it didn't have a hugely disruptive impact on my business. It's a reminder that you can't rely too heavily on AI as a founder, and you should always have a backup plan in case of unforeseen circumstances.

I was keen to give Fable a try, but it was short-lived

I like using OpenAI's Codex for repetitive, code-intensive work, and Claude for tasks that help design the product's aesthetics. AI has been able to completely change the architecture of our codebase in a day, whereas a task like that would've taken a developer weeks to do manually.

After seeing so much about it online, I wanted to use Fable to conduct a full review of our product for safety and security flags. The model was in the middle of making some key changes to our codebase when it got shut off instantly with a notice saying, "Claude Fable 5 is currently unavailable."

I didn't realize until the next day that this had happened because the US government ordered Anthropic to block foreign access to the model. It's been a bit of a bummer, and I feel bad for the people at Anthropic for making a brilliant product and having the rug pulled from under them, too. I'm also quite annoyed we didn't get to do more with Fable. I think it could've propelled us so much further.

Being prepared helped us avoid a huge disruption

This isn't the first time we've had issues with using Claude. In the past, when we used Opus 4.6, it would stop mid-task because it hit the token limit so quickly. We didn't realize how token-heavy the tool was, and it left our codebase in a bit of a mess.

Because we'd learned this lesson with 4.6, we made sure we were more prepared for unforeseen circumstances with using AI.

When we started our product review last week, I asked Fable to create a guide that both Claude or other AI models could follow. This enabled us to pass the remaining tasks to other agents when we lost access to Fable. We passed some to Codex and others to Claude 4.8. If we hadn't been prepared this way, the Fable issue could've resulted in lots of work being out the window.

Fable getting pulled didn't have a major impact because we were ready for it, but it ruined our momentum. We're working on a deadline, and every minute counts, so delays like this can be quite disruptive.

Always have a plan B

This Anthropic incident has solidified my conviction that you can't depend completely on AI.

If the government were to shut off AI access completely, our business wouldn't end, because we've already built out our platform, but we are quite dependent on AI. A situation like that would likely increase our costs, partly because we'd have to switch to the old-school method of hiring developers.

In today's AI era, it's important to always have a plan B. Don't just rely on one AI tool. It's good to understand the strengths of different models.

Make sure you're documenting things as you go by keeping records that exist outside your AI tool. If Claude knows all about our code base, but it gets pulled tomorrow, would I be able to give that over to a developer? At this stage, I think I could, because I've been documenting everything as I go. It's a fail-safe.

A spokesperson from The White House told Business Insider, "The Trump administration is collaborating with AI industry leaders to balance cutting-edge innovation with national security concerns that affect both the United States and our allies."

Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Do you have a similar story to share? If so, you can reach out to one of the reporters at aapplegate@businessinsider.com and ccheong@businessinsider.com.

• Business Insider asked six tech workers which task they're saving the most time on with AI.
• Some workers said AI has turned tasks that once took hours into minutes.
• Others said the productivity gains haven't necessarily led to shorter workdays.

Ask a tech worker how AI has changed their jobs, and chances are they'll answer with a single number: hours saved.

In interviews with Business Insider, Big Tech software engineers, product managers, and data scientists described using AI to compress hours of work into minutes. They use it to draft documents, summarize months of meetings, review code, automate reports, and more.

Faster doesn't always mean easier, however. One Amazon data scientist said AI is adding hours to his workweek as he builds the automation systems that should eventually save him time. Another Amazon employee said any time saved is quickly redirected to the next project.

Here's how six tech workers said AI is saving them the most time. (Their responses have been edited for length and clarity.)

The time AI saves me gets reinvested into the next problem

Priyanka Devi Ramesh is a business intelligence engineer at Amazon. She's 30 and lives in Virginia.

Document writing is where AI has had the greatest impact. With the help of an AI tool called Pippin, it's become easy to translate my thoughts about the projects I'm working on into polished documents that can be technical or customer-facing. This saves a massive amount of time — I spend hardly 15 to 20 minutes max to write and finalize a document that would have previously taken me well over an hour.

On the technical side, I use Kiro and Amazon Quick. Kiro is great for brainstorming ideas and making logic updates in minutes. I'm building agents within Amazon Quick to automate common customer questions about dashboards and to surface insights from data.

AI hasn't reduced my work time. We're constantly looking for ways to clean up messy data and finding opportunities to automate wherever possible — so the time saved in one area gets reinvested into the next problem.

AI helps me make sense of months of meetings at Google

Prerit Pathak is a security engineer at Google. He's 27 and lives in New York City.

I use Gemini for a variety of purposes, but recently it has bolstered my note-taking.

I used to take shorthand notes during meetings to record interesting or important information. Now, I let Gemini take notes on my work calls, and the improvement has been incredible. A summarization task — such as understanding what happened over the previous six months — that once would have taken one to two hours now takes five to 10 minutes.

I'm working longer hours now, so AI can save me time later

Sarthak Gupta is a data scientist at Amazon. He's 29 and lives in Seattle.

AI has been most helpful with building end-to-end automation pipelines for recurring workflows.

It used to take 8 to 10 hours over a couple of days to create a monthly stakeholder report that involved pulling data, cleaning it, generating visualizations, and writing the summary. Now, an AI pipeline handles the data pulls, transformations, and dashboard refreshes. I spend maybe 45 minutes reviewing the output and adding context before sending it out.

However, my overall working hours right now are running longer than normal. The reason is that we're in the middle of an automation phase. Building the pipelines, integrating the AI tooling, validating outputs, and onboarding all of this into existing workflows is front-loaded work, and that upfront investment is real. The payoff comes later, when the same task that took a couple of days collapses into a button click.

So in the short term, AI is actually adding hours to my week, not subtracting them. I'd expect that to flip once the foundational pipelines are stable and the automation is doing the heavy lifting on its own.

AI helps me turn messy ideas into polished plans

Tanvi Pisal is a UX designer working as a contractor for Apple via Red Oak Technologies. She's 29 and lives in San Jose.

One of the biggest ways AI saves me time is in early-stage product thinking and documentation.

As a product designer, I used to spend hours drafting product requirement documents, brainstorming user stories, mapping edge cases, outlining use scenarios, and refining ideation before I even got to visual design.

Now, I can start with rough notes or a messy draft, and AI helps turn that into a much more structured document in minutes. What used to take me three to four hours can often be reduced to 30 minutes with feedback and refinements.

AI gets me to the starting line faster at Amazon

Udit Mehrotra is a head of product at Amazon. He's in his 30s and lives in Seattle.

Writing product documents is where I've seen the biggest change. Every major initiative at Amazon starts with a written document, and for years, the first hour or two of that process was building scaffolding: setting up the structure, filling in the sections you know by heart, and building something worth reacting to before you could get to the actual thinking.

Now I can use AI to input the customer problem and constraints and get a solid first draft in minutes. What surprises me is that it's often more comprehensive than what I'd have written on my own under time pressure.

Getting from 80% to 100% is still where the real work lives, and AI doesn't change that. The strategic judgment, the tradeoffs between what customers need and what's technically feasible, the decisions that require years of accumulated context about a specific customer problem — that thinking still takes the same depth and care it always did.

What has changed is that I arrive at the starting line faster, with a more complete structure to react to and push against. The quality of the final document is often better as a result, not because AI did the hard thinking, but because I spent more of my time on it.

What used to take a week can now take a day

Iren Azra Zou is a software engineer at the trucking logistics startup Double Nickel. She's in her 20s and lives in New Jersey.

I use AI, mostly Claude Code, for the majority of my coding. It's honestly hard to quantify the time savings; it feels like what used to take a week can now take a day.

We also rely heavily on AI to review and provide feedback on code, unless a change is particularly risky. That alone saves a huge amount of time. Instead of waiting days for human reviews, you get multiple rounds of feedback within hours. It also means I spend less time reviewing others' code, which probably saves me several hours each week.

There are tradeoffs — less human review can have downsides. But right now, the speed of iteration and innovation is incredibly valuable for us.

Do you have a story to share about how you're navigating a career crossroads? If so, please reach out to the reporter via email at jzinkula@businessinsider.com, or via Signal at jzinkula.29.

• Claude and Claude Code weren't working for many users on Tuesday morning.
• Anthropic listed a "major outage" on its dashboard before applying a fix.
• Both Claude and ChatGPT have frequently experienced outages as interest in AI chatbots continues to grow.

Claude is still struggling to keep up with vibe coders.

Anthropic's popular Claude AI chatbot and Claude Code tool weren't working for many users on Tuesday morning.

Claude's system status page listed a "major outage" for the Claude website and Claude Code. Thousands of users reported issues accessing Claude on the third-party outage-tracker DownDetector.

Claude Cowork and the Claude API were both listed as operational.

Roughly 90 minutes later, Anthropic said it had "applied a fix."

"We have applied a fix and success rates have returned to normal," the company said in its status dashboard. "We are continuing to monitor closely to ensure there are no further issues."

This is far from the first time Claude has experienced an outage. Thousands of users reported issues accessing the service on Monday, and Anthropic's status dashboard shows various issues in recent weeks.

There's been a surge in interest in Claude, with downloads of the Claude app briefly surpassing ChatGPT in early March on Apple's App Store.

Anthropic didn't immediately respond to a request for additional comment on the incident.

This is a developing story.