As major corporations go, insurance companies are about the closest thing we have to rational actors. With the job of underwriting a huge range of financial risks in a volatile market economy, the buck stops with them — meaning that by and large, they’re not going to insure any new product that’s particularly risky or untested.
In other words, insurance companies have to be practical to stay operational, even when the stock market wants to be anything but. The industry is a huge believer in climate change, for example, for the simple reason that hurricanes, wildfires, and droughts can all have a major impact on their bottom line.
That raises an interesting question: how does the insurance industry feel about AI, a highly experimental technology with almost no track record of financial success? New reporting by the Financial Times reveals some unease: top insurance firms like AIG, American Financial Group’s Great American, and WR Berkley are begging US regulators to let them exclude AI liability from their policies.
Basically, the companies are concerned about fielding multibillion-dollar claims, reflecting greater anxiety about AI’s potential to cause costly and unpredictable damage to corporate revenue.
WR Berkley, for example, is asking for permission not to cover claims stemming from “any actual or alleged use” of AI, including any product or service sold by a company “incorporating” the software. In AIG’s case, the exclusion requests seem to be a precaution, with a spokesperson telling the FT that the company has “no plans to implement them at this time.”
There have been other signs that the insurance industry has been growing increasingly anxious about AI risks in recent months.
Cybersecurity policies, which act like a financial safety net in the event of costly cyberattacks such as ransomeware or data breaches, are a particular area of concern for the industry. That’s thanks to AI itself, which is helping black hat criminals breed new kinds of malware, while also introducing new vulnerabilities to companies that deploy AI tools.
“It’s too much of a black box,” Dennis Bertram, Europe head of cyber insurance for Mosaic told the FT. Representing a major specialty insurer with a key focus on cyber risk, Bertram’s fears are noteworthy. Though Mosaic covers some risks related to specific software where AI is embedded, the firm chooses not to cover risks from large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude, the FT notes.
With the US economy banking almost entirely on AI for growth at this point, insurance companies going out of their way not to insure AI isn’t exactly a comforting sign.
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