Hello, your name is on it.Their kill switch is under it.
This is the invitation from my email. Thanks for opening it.
You talked a client into investing real money in an AI system you built. It runs on a model you don't control. One price change, one retired model, one flagged account, and it stops. Your client won't call the AI company. They'll call you.
This isn't public. On purpose.
Randall reached out to you personally because we respect your work. We're asking a small group of creators and builders to help shape this guild before anyone announces anything.
Nothing is locked in. Not the programs, not the dues, not the rules. The founding members decide those. We'd rather get this right with fifty of the right people than loud with fifty thousand.
coun·ter·vail
/ˈkoun-tər-ˌvāl/verbTo act against with equal force, power, or effect; to oppose or balance an overpowering weight.
To compensate for, make amends for, or counterbalance an asymmetry.
Right now, all the leverage sits on one side of the table: the trillion-dollar frontier labs that control the models, set the pricing, and dictate the terms. A single builder, educator, or agency has zero counterweight.
Countervail is the counterweight. By pooling our volume, our client contracts, our technical standards, and our collective reputation, we create equal force where builders previously had none.
Everyone building on AI is building on rented land.
Pricing changes overnight. Your margins and your client quotes don't get a vote.
The model your product depends on gets retired, and you rebuild on someone else's timeline.
An account gets flagged. No human, no appeal, no warning. Your client's business stops.
Every request you send runs through their servers. They can see what's working before you can scale it.
On September 15, 2026, TypeSafe AI, an independent startup, launched Jev, a new kind of AI model. Fourteen days later, OpenAI announced its own version, and an OpenAI lead later credited Jev with inspiring it. Competition is fair. But when the company that runs your model can match your idea in two weeks, you need more than a head start.
Sources: TechCrunch, Fortune
A guild for everyone building on top.
You're building your own models and platforms next to giants who can ship your idea in a month.
Your reputation rides on systems whose foundation you don't own. When it breaks, your name is on the invoice.
You teach millions of people to build on these tools. Your audience trusts you to point them somewhere safe.
One builder gets ignored. Ten thousand don't.
A starting draft. Founding members will cut, add, and rank these.
Collective pressure for written commitments from AI providers: real notice before price changes and model retirements, a human appeal for account actions, and no using our usage data to compete with us.
Shared standards and tools so the systems we build can switch models fast when a provider changes the rules.
A Countervail mark that tells a client: this system is built to survive a provider shutdown. Your biggest liability becomes a selling point.
A timestamped record of member innovations, for disputes and for the public record.
Pooled resources, so no single member takes on a trillion-dollar company alone.
Nobody has done this for AI. So let's figure it out together.
There's no rulebook for the AI economy. But other industries hit the same wall, where a few players held all the leverage, and the people who depended on them organized. These aren't templates. They're proof it can be done.
Every stockbroker in America answers to a private, nonprofit organization that writes the rules, checks the work, and protects the people on the other side of the deal. It isn't a government agency. It earned its authority by being the trusted middle, with the government as a backstop. Nothing like it exists for AI yet.
Songwriters couldn't chase every radio station and bar that played their songs. So they pooled their rights and negotiated together. Today those collectives get millions of creators paid. One voice is easy to ignore. A catalog isn't.
Buildings kept burning, so an independent lab started testing electrical products and putting a mark on the ones that passed. No law required it at first. Buyers and insurers did. That mark became the reason people trust what they plug in.
We don't have all the answers, and we're not going to pretend we do. What we're committing to is building the platform where we work it out together. You bring what you've learned the hard way.
What this is
What this isn't
We're the people who build on these tools every day: agency owners, independent developers, creators, and tradespeople turned AI builders. We love these tools. We also know what it feels like to sell a client on something we don't fully control.
I run Rocket Digital Marketing, an AI agency. Our whole business depends on these models, and we're investing heavily in building our own AI tools and products. We can't afford a rug pull, and I don't think you can either.
That concern, watching the rug get pulled out from under all of us, is what motivated me to stop waiting and take action. If enough of us organize before that happens, we don't have to be at the mercy of a single provider's next decision.
That's why we're starting Countervail, and why we want to start it with you instead of announcing it at you. So, I hope you'll be one of the first.
Be a founding member.
Nobody has figured this out yet, so we'll figure it out together. We'll build the platform. We need your experience to decide what goes on it. No cost and no commitment: just tell us what you'd need from a guild like this, and whether you want a seat at the founding table.
Founding Member Charter