By Bill Alpert

As businesses hustle to incorporate artificial intelligence in everything they do, their insurers want no part of it. Across the commercial insurance industry, new policies say they won't cover losses caused by chatbots.

Early this year, word spread that the specialty insurer W.R. Berkley was putting an "absolute" exclusion of coverage for "any actual or alleged use, deployment, or development of Artificial Intelligence" in some liability policies for corporate directors and officers.

Other insurers are following, for fear that erroneous price quotes or medical diagnoses from a generative AI model could lead to thousands of claims. A Sunday article in the Financial Times reported that American International Group and the Great American Insurance unit of the American Financial Group have asked state regulators to approve policies that would bar claims for AI's errors.

AI exclusions could become an industry standard next year. In 2026, the consulting firm Verisk Analytics will provide its insurance customers with forms that can generally exclude this "emerging exposure".

Verisk's forms would exclude coverage for bodily injury, property damage, or personal and advertising injury caused by generative AI. It defines gen-AI as "a machine-based learning system or model that is trained on data with the ability to create content or responses, including but not limited to text, images, audio, video or code."

If that sounds like every chatbot offered by OpenAI, Meta Platforms, Alphabet's Google, or Anthropic, that's clearly what the insurers intend.

But whether the insurance industry will succeed in blocking all AI claims is far from settled. Just what is an "AI use", and what is "AI", in the first place, remain subject to interpretation, said a May 2025 note by lawyers at the national insurance litigation firm Hunton Andrews Kurth.

"Insurance policies are sold by insurance brokers," wrote the lawyers. "They're bought by risk managers; claims are handled by claim handlers and disputes are typically decided by judges."

Write to Bill Alpert at william.alpert@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 24, 2025 14:35 ET (19:35 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.