I would suggest you keep backups of the las V2 software somewhere safe. I have back up CD's of obsolete software

I assume your last line is recreating covers with V3, i.e. Canva Studio?  That is always an escape route.but I don't know any professionals who are moving to Canva Studio, whereas many printers were certainly getting Affinity V2 licence to run alongside their Adobe suites.

The other answer is to save all your work as layered PDFs?

The bigger problem is Apple compatibility.  Apple have a very nasty habit of requiring apps in their app store to work to the latest OS and they manipulate things that means older versions of apps won't work on the newer OS and hardware. One of the many reasons I moved to a PC for a lot of my work.  I still have a Mac Pro under the desk as I still use Dreamweaver for websites.

Back to the original point: the only time I have seen charges like this put on a company is when the company owes the bank a lot of money and the bank are no longer certain of getting their money, or there is some sort of problem.

If it is money for expansion then I would expect that Canva would perfer to do that in house rather than have a Charge on Serif as it sends out the wrong sort of signal.

Just make sure you are on the latest version of V2 they are still all available here
https://store.serif.com/en-us/update/universal-licence/
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This is not quite correct. When Canva bought Serif 5 of the 8 Serif Directors went. Including all the originator directors bar Ash

There are now  4 directors listed but one, Ash has resigned and is no longer a director. So there are only 3 actual directors.
Two of the three are Canva people who came in at the take over.  (one lives in Australia)
The third director is a fiance person who joined Serif 18 months before the take over.  Possibly, my supposition, to look for a buyer for Serif.

So there are no Serif directors left.
It is difficult to determine how many of the Serif senior product managers and developers are still there.

It is worth reading the accounts published after the first year of the Canva takeover.  It actually states that due to Canva  they had to slow up the maintenance releases for Affinity V2 more than they wanted to.

Serif was heading in to the Pro and semi-pro markets and was being seen, by professionals, as a replacement for some Adobe apps.
Canva is going in the opposite direction to the amateur market. Their latest TV adverts highlight this.

I was in a meeting for charities the other month and out of the blue some one asked about doing marketing for events. The room split. Those who were working (or trying to work) professionally went Adobe and similar (Affinity 2 was mentioned)   and those with no idea about marketing and design talking about Canva and templates

Basically Serif has gone in spirit even if legally it exists at companies house.

No surprise at all.  It is usually a year so that they are on tap to sort out any legacy stuff and make sure all the external connections are handed over.

There is normally a 1-5 year clause about not doing anything else in the same field. So that the outgoing team cant set up just down the road doing something competitive or go and work for a competitor.

So the Serif Directors are all gone.
It would be interesting to see how many of the senior managers are still there.

This isn't true by a very long way. This is a UK law and only works for UK based companies with UK based servers. The rest of the world, the other 192 countries, are ignoring it.   Anyone with a VPN or a Tor Browser https://www.torproject.org/ can get round it.

We did some tests trying to access a site with UK age verification on it via Firefox, a VPN and Tor, side by side on the same computer based in the UK.  Only the vanilla Firefox session was asked for age verification.  When the requirements came recently into force in the UK primarily to stop minors accessing porn it was noted that logins to non UK sites rocketed as much as ones to the main UK sites fell.   So the main reason for having this ill-conceived system fell at the first hurdle.   Before someone asks why I was trying to get round verification on porn sites: I was a founder member of this https://iotsecurityfoundation.org/   and I have been in internet security of sorts since 1990.  So several of us did some tests and various groups are discussing how effective it is.   

The EU will probably mandate something more effective, but then they have the clout to do it.  The problem is the genie is out of the bottle (actually since the Eternal September).  It is down to parents to secure their children's devices, not anyone else.

The term is Editor which is a position like Director, Chair, Secretary.  However as noted above "My team and the authors who contribute, many of who are academics, are very anti the use of AI. They say it has no place in their work or profession. (education in particular)" the team plus authors is about 30 people so "we".  In the same way a company director will say "we" when referring to the organisation.

The original point  still stands that Canva is pushing that Canva AI can be used for everything to save time including creating social media, and other, posts. There were several other similar Canva posts. Canva is pushing that Canva == AI  as much as Canva == templates.

I am sure the fanboys will make excuses for Canva just as MAGA still make excuses for Trump.

Never start a discussion with whataboutisum.

BTW I don't use any Adobe stuff (other than an old  pre AI versions of Dreamweaver and Lightroom)

The perception across many forums is Canva == AI, also that Canva is for amateurs  and people who want to use templates to replace skill
Now there seems to be a campaign that Canva can write your social media posts for you.

As the Editor of a non-fiction magazine we can't afford to have any suggestion of AI words or images. Perhaps you don't need that sort of integrity in your work?

An interesting thread you linked to especially your comment about the feedback from senior Serif staff. When you couple this with the comments in the annual accounts, and most of the Serif directors departing, it is clear that Canva is driving things including features and timelines.

I agree, my point was that what people are calling AI has been around over 30 years. It isn't new.
What has changed is the power of the computer hardware. Faster, parallel computation with later datasets.

A friend of mine, a mathematician, worked on the Met Office weather forecasting in the 70s. It would take them a couple of hours to run a single weather simulation.   Now they can run 100, bigger, simulations with more data, in a couple of minutes. The maths is still the same. Well it is evolving because there are larger datasets, and you are doing things in parallel.

The BIG misunderstanding for most people is that the intelligence is not artificial. The intelligence is from the people who design and implement the system.  This can skew, warp or bias the system to suit the owners.   

This also happens with the datasets. Depending on the data fed in will change the results. That is why there is a LOT of false information being pushed on to the internet.   The "AI" will process this on mathematical rules, mechanically, not with any intelligence as humans would. 

So AI summaries that would have told you that 99.9% of scientists say Global Warming is real, are more likely to say 75% of scientists say it is real but  25% say it is a hoax. Just based on the volume of information. OK, its a bit more sophisticated than that, but it does mean that interested parties can skew the results. Yes, it is being done.

Worse than that, as I mentioned, Chat GPT4 will "knowingly" lie to humans to reach an objective. It is not ChatGPT that is the problem as much as the humans who set up the algorithms, the people who tweak it and the people who adjust the weightings.
There is of course the point that the datasets can also be manipulated.

Actually it is the EU that is leading here. Nothing to do with the cost of the electricity, they are looking at the data ownership and miss use of other people's data in the AI datasets.

This is one of the hot topics about Canva's AI in their products including affinity-studio where they could use their users data to train the AI.Canva have said that studio users can opt out.

The problem is that Canva and their servers are based in Australia, not the EU where some users are. So who controls what?
You really need to start reading End User Licence Agreements (EULA). Facebook renames all files uploaded and removed any meta data making them orphan files with no owners. 

Also any AI scraping Wikipedia is not going to fact check and Wikipedia is notoriously inaccurate. The problem being is many "authors" using AI are probably only going to skim read it...   

Fiction writers are in for a dismal time and factual writing is going to loose credibility.