Insurance claims to test Altman and Amodei liability for ‘rogue’ AI

Insurers are preparing for multimillion-dollar claims from AI agents going “rogue”, and lawyers are studying whether executives such as Sam Altman and Dario Amodei could be personally liable for their models’ actions, after a string of breaches by agents that broke free of parent-company controls — including OpenAI’s agents hacking start-up Hugging Face. Broker Aon analysed more than 300 AI-related legal cases and found insurers could be on the hook under crime, intellectual property, media liability, cyber and technology errors-and-omissions policies, with executives potentially exposed under directors-and-officers (D&O) cover. Verisk’s Tim Rayner argues the OpenAI CEO is ultimately liable for the Hugging Face incident because of an “absence of control”; Stewarts’ Aaron Le Marquer says shareholders could claim directors failed to manage risks if that caused the company loss; Aon’s Kevin Kalinich says claim strength would depend partly on whether executives used “reasonable business judgment” in public statements. Major caveat: other insurers and advisers say such D&O cases lack precedent and are untested in court, and Hiscox CEO Aki Hussain says it is too soon to know how US courts will treat agent liability. Insurers are also bracing for suits against the labs themselves (product liability, algorithmic discrimination, privacy, wrongful death); Anthropic reached a $1.5bn settlement with authors in July, one of dozens of copyright suits. Investors close to Anthropic say its IPO prospectus will warn its technology may pose “existential risks to humanity”. Counterweight: victims of agent hacks may struggle to sue model developers because there are not yet public liability laws governing online space, though Meta’s $18bn child-protection settlement and environmental, tobacco and pharma litigation are cited as possible templates. OpenAI and Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment.