Right now, a lot of leaders are quietly asking the same question: With the recent privacy concerns around ChatGPT, should I move to Claude?
That’s a fair question. If you’re using AI inside real client work, internal strategy, or sensitive thinking, privacy and how a platform uses data matter.
You might not be able to move quickly.
Even if you decide Claude is the better option.
If your Custom GPTs are built inside ChatGPT… If your team is trained there… If your workflows depend on it… If your internal language evolved around it…
Leaving becomes an operational project. Staying, at least temporarily, can be a rational leadership decision because ripping out infrastructure without a transition plan creates chaos.
But this isn’t really about ChatGPT vs. Claude
The current headlines are timely for another lesson I’ve learned in over a decade of marketing. If you’re paying attention to what’s happening right now, you know what I’m referring to. What I want to talk about is the lesson underneath it, because the lesson will outlast the event.
Which is to be platform agnostic. It means building your business in a way that makes you movable, so when moments like these arise, your decisions are based on what’s right for your business, not on how stuck you are. This is not a contingency plan, it’s a design principle for your business operations.
This pattern isn’t new. I’ve watched it play out in marketing more times than I can count. A CRM gets acquired, and the pricing triples. An email platform changes its policies mid-contract. An algorithm rewrites itself and the audience you spent two years building disappears overnight. You want to leave but realize you can’t, or at least not quickly, not without a real operational project on your hands.
That pattern’s now arrived in AI and it’s only beginning we have so much changing for AI platforms and tools to make we’re going to see pricing and policy changes, feature changes and more.
The Leadership Question
If privacy concerns or pricing escalated tomorrow and you decided you needed to move off ChatGPT immediately, could you rebuild your AI setup in a week?
Do you have your core instructions saved somewhere you control? Are your important prompts documented? Are your knowledge files stored outside the platform?
If not, now’s the time to start taking care of it. ChatGPT can help you extract the context and frameworks you’ve been using, the invisible thinking it’s caught on to, and create context documents for you.
Ask it for frameworks you use in thinking, how you work, and how your business operates, and have it create documents for you. Along with extracting all the prompts and system instructions you use and any reference/knowledge base documents you’ve used in projects and Custom GPTs.
This moment, this ChatGPT vs. Claude conversation, is a useful reminder.
Your real asset isn’t the tool.
The real test isn’t which platform has better features this month.
The test is: if your primary AI tool became unavailable tomorrow, could you rebuild what you’ve built? Are your prompts documented somewhere? Your custom instructions saved? Your context portable?
If the answer is no, this is the moment to change that. Not out of panic, but because inflection points like this one reveal exactly where your systems are fragile. And right now in this moment, we still have time.
The leaders who handle platform transitions gracefully aren’t the ones who saw them coming. They’re the ones who’d already built to be movable knowing that they needed to own their data and their information or be able to download the audience they’ve built.
I’ve built too deep before, in CRMs, email marketing systems, on social platforms and ended up stuck or delayed because there was so much preparation in order to make the change. It’s the lesson we all learn at some business point. I’ve always told clients to own their data, their workflows, systems and processes.
If You’ve Decided to Move (or Just Want a Backup Your AI Now)
Moving to Claude now.
If you’ve got Custom GPTs in ChatGPT, your GPT is really just two things:
- the instructions you wrote
- the documents you uploaded
Open Claude,
- create a new Project
- paste in your instructions
- upload your files.
Anthropic just added a feature to import memory from other AI platforms. It also includes steps for exporting memory FROM Claude as well.
Not moving but getting ready
Start here regardless of what you decide: export your full ChatGPT history now. Settings → Data Controls → Export Data. It takes a few minutes, and you’ll have it. Save this in a library.
Then build a simple library in your drive (Google, Sharepoint, Documents folder):
- Your most-used prompts
- System instructions from any Custom GPTs or Projects
- Your workflows and SOPs
- Core business reference documents
- Your context documents — the background any AI needs about you, your business, your clients, and how you work
If you don’t have context documents yet, this is the moment to create them. Ask ChatGPT to write one for you.
Ask it: “Based on everything you know about how I use AI, my patterns, my preferences, the kinds of work I ask you to help with, write a summary I could use as context on another platform.”
(Or check out Anthropic’s memory exporting prompt)
The AI has been watching you operate and can distill that into something you can carry over to another platform. That summary becomes your context document, the thing that travels with you and tells any AI assistant who you are and how you think.
Your AI work is more portable than you think. Build from here like you might need to move, because someday, you will.
Build So You’re Never Trapped
You may stay on ChatGPT. You may move to Claude. The market will keep shifting. Right now in AI, the goal isn’t to predict which platform wins, we’re a long way from that.
The goal is to build your systems in a way that makes you movable, not just with AI but with CRMs, your workflows, email platforms, SaaS products you use. Once you begin this practice, it becomes a mindset embedded in how your business runs and how you, as a leader, operate.
The cost of portability is small and boring, but the cost of not having it only shows up when you’re under pressure.
Leaders design for optionality, and that protects the business’s leverage.
If you’re not sure where your systems are fragile, that’s exactly the conversation I have with clients. DM me if you are interested in more help.
Original article: https://www.smartmarketingsquad.com/build-your-business-never-platform-trapped/