Is Singapore ready for an AI outage?
Anthropic suspended access to its most advanced models in response to a US government directive. It’s a warning sign.
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
A country can use AI widely and still be vulnerable if critical systems depend too heavily on a small number of foreign models, cloud providers or vendors.
ST PHOTO: GIN TAY
Roy Ka-Wei Lee
Imagine you are overseas and trying to verify a suspicious bank transaction with an AI customer service assistant. Just as it is checking your identity, retrieving the transaction details and routing you to the right support channel, the system stops because the backend artificial intelligence model is no longer available.
For a bank customer, this is frustrating; for healthcare, public services or other critical services, the stakes can be even higher. This may sound hypothetical, but it is not far-fetched as AI becomes embedded into everyday digital services.
