The rise in popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) presents new cybersecurity risks and leads to novel problems of exposure accumulation for insurance companies, as discussed in the November 2024 research paper, Outlook on AI-Driven Systemic Risks and Opportunities, co-authored by the Cyber Center of Excellence from Guy Carpenter, a Marsh business, and CyberCube. This follow-up publication continues our efforts to explore an analytical pathway toward assessing and quantifying AI’s impact on cyber risk, both within specific cyber coverages and beyond the affirmative cyber line of business.
Key Takeaways
- The current cyber risk modeling framework provides the flexibility to incorporate changing trends, technologies and scenarios.
- While AI technology may create new single points of failure, such technology will also be used by cyber attack perpetrators in existing attack vectors, including ransomware. Increased defensive capabilities will offset at least some of this impact.
- Enterprise AI use cases are still confined to areas that bring about differentiation, intelligence and efficiencies. Though potentially important, interruption in these areas does not necessarily lead to major cyber insurance accumulation.
- Looking ahead, it is important for the industry to identify and start modeling silent AI exposures as the market recognizes them and chooses a path of action.
- For affirmative cyber policies, AI will be an accelerator of threat actor capabilities within current cyber scenarios for both attritional and aggregation events. However, there will be offsetting impacts in the cyber security space making the overall effect uncertain.
- Insurers are showing increased interest during underwriting and risk selection in the ways their insureds are leveraging AI capabilities in business operations.
- While some aspects of AI risk find a natural home in pre-existing cyber policies, others extend beyond the scope of the affirmative cyber policy. As the insurance industry matures in its understanding of the risk posed by AI, we can expect to see greater opportunities for growth and innovation in insurance coverage.