The short answer
Teams can inventory model IDs, owners, prompts, eval sets, fallbacks, budgets, and customer-facing notices before a retirement becomes an outage.
The decision standard is simple: preserve the source, state the limits, and make the next human check obvious. A useful article should reduce uncertainty without pretending that every unknown has been resolved.
What to examine
A sunset date can affect a chat product, an API, or both. The useful story is not the goodbye headline; it is the migration path, test window, cost change, and failure plan.
Start with scope. Identify the product, account, audience, jurisdiction, data, and decision involved. Then separate what was directly observed from what a vendor, researcher, regulator, or commentator says. Record dates because AI products, access rules, and prices change quickly.
A similarly named replacement may behave differently. Prompt compatibility is not the same as output equivalence, and a chat retirement does not necessarily imply an API retirement.
A practical way to do it
- List every production and manual workflow using the retiring model.
- Run a frozen evaluation set against the proposed replacement.
- Approve a rollback, budget ceiling, and customer communication plan.
Keep the worksheet or test record with the draft. If another editor cannot reproduce the check from the saved evidence, the article is not ready.
Editorial guardrail
Do not fill a missing fact with a plausible sentence. Mark it as unknown, find a stronger source, narrow the claim, or remove it. Commentary belongs in a clearly labeled paragraph after the reported facts, not inside them.
Primary-source reading list
These are starting points, not automatic support for every sentence. The publishing editor must open each cited page and confirm the claim it supports on the day of review.
Bottom line
Teams can inventory model IDs, owners, prompts, eval sets, fallbacks, budgets, and customer-facing notices before a retirement becomes an outage.