When Anthropic’s Fable 5 was pulled from international use for nearly three weeks, some over-reliant businesses were left scrambling.But Liberty Mutual easily pivoted to other platforms. That’s because 18 months earlier, they built their “AI backbone” exactly for this kind of scenario.In this rapidly moving AI landscape, the 114-year-old property and casualty insurance company recognized independence as an operating advantage.“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.”Enterprises need flexibility to hook into different models and vendors, depending not so much on the “flavor of the day,” but “what can you feel confident about for the next six months,” he said. Runtime versus control plane The company’s “backbone” (or control plane) is its own, while everything underneath remains swappable. The architecture consists of roughly 50 components across security, identity, orchestration, tool restriction, and the policies that govern how agents behave. Each is designed to be independently and immediately replaceable to support interoperability. The agent runtime below this backbone is AWS’s Amazon Bedrock AgentCore; this is not the strategic center, but explicitly “just for running the agents,” Craig said. He chose this offering because it (at least currently) supports multiple frameworks and Liberty Mutual’s model-agnostic philosophy. “We still have flexibility based on what we write,” Craig said. “But if something comes along and is better, we will move to it quite quickly.” The software factoryThis architecture delivers, as proven by Liberty’s “software factory,” an agentic pipeline that automates much of the software delivery p …
