Beazley expands cyber cover for AI malfunctions and regulatory risks
FTSE 100 insurance giant Beazley has launched a new cyber line for businesses that insures against unintentional regulatory non-compliance and financial and reputational losses as a result of AI system malfunctions.
Speaking to City AM, the speciality insurer’s head of cyber risks, Alessandro Lezzi, said the move comes as the firm sees “AI changing the threat landscape” and a need to “explicitly” state to clients that AI-related incidents are covered under their existing policies.
“As a market, as a business, we almost have a duty of care to provide that coverage to clients,” he said.
The new cover spans across two areas of Beazley’s cyber insurance policies, focusing on helping clients defend against their unintentional misuse of AI, which risks breaches of AI legislation and leads to allegations from regulators and fines or investigations, and insuring against any business interruption or loss of earnings due to needing to shut down an AI system due to performance issues.
Cyber insurance has been a fruitful market over the past few years, with a spike in cyberattacks affecting prominent business names including M&S, Harrods, and Jaguar Land Rover, exposing a gap which companies need to insure.
Lezzi said the Jaguar Land Rover attack, which saw the car giant halt production and retail operations last September, was a “huge incident” which illustrated the need for cyber and AI cover “to become a compulsory policy.”
AI risk headache for the market
AI is causing a new headache for the market, particularly around agentic AI, as underwriters and insurers scramble to quantify the risk this tech poses and price it.
Lezzi said the current insurance market is not pricing the growing risk exposure of AI, as well as geopolitical shifts, accurately enough. “Internationally, the price is actually going down, but the exposure is actually growing,” Lezzi said, adding that by introducing the new AI cover, Beazley wants to avoid “being volatile.”
“Our view is to create a sustainable market and product, and try to create a price and a product which is sustainable through time,” he said.
Lezzi added: “I see this becoming almost a policy that all the companies should have, especially because the exposure is changing. We have AI now, and then we’re going to have quantum computing- another threat – and then the combination of quantum computing and AI is going to create different exposure as well.”