Check out the latest news and insights to stay in the know about the trends and innovations driving the insurance industry forward.
Latest Articles as of July 9
News: OpenAI ends federally requested access limits on GPT-5.6
The brief: OpenAI said it will publicly release its GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna models, ending weeks of restricted access at the request of the US government under the June AI executive order. The order asked developers to voluntarily submit frontier models for federal safety review before wider release, part of the same framework insurance regulators and enterprise buyers are watching as they set AI governance policies. OpenAI said GPT-5.6 Sol is its strongest model to date, with the company citing gains in coding, biology, and cybersecurity. The launch follows a similar path taken by Anthropic, which restored access to its latest models last week after a weeks-long clash with the government.
News: El Niño may shift storm and wildfire risk in unexpected directions
The brief: NOAA formally declared El Niño in June and puts the probability of an extreme event above 60% by winter, with catastrophe modeler Karen Clark and Company publishing a July whitepaper on what that could mean for insured losses. KCC noted El Niño historically reduces North Atlantic hurricane activity but cautioned that the correlation between ENSO phase and insured losses is weak, since the biggest driver of losses is where storms strike, not how many form. The report flagged a possible increase in severe convective storm activity in the US Southeast in spring 2027 if the pattern persists, alongside potentially reduced wildfire activity in California from El Niño-linked atmospheric rivers. KCC estimated a single major hurricane striking Miami, Tampa, or Houston could still produce insured losses exceeding $100 billion at today's exposure levels.
News: Illinois signs first-in-nation AI safety audit law
The brief: Governor JB Pritzker signed the Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act on July 6, making Illinois the first state to require mandatory annual third-party safety audits of large AI developers. The law, modeled on California and New York bills but going further on the audit requirement, obligates covered developers to publish risk-mitigation frameworks, report significant safety incidents within 72 hours, and maintain whistleblower protections. Illinois lawmakers estimated California, New York, and Illinois together account for roughly 40% of the US AI market, positioning the trio as a de facto national framework. The law takes effect January 1, 2028.
News: Travelers used AI and geospatial imagery on Palisades and Eaton fire claims
The brief: Travelers' 2025 Sustainability Report described a phase of AI deployment the carrier calls "Innovation 2.0," with more than 20,000 employees now using AI tools regularly and dozens of generative AI applications in production. Following the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires, Travelers used high-resolution aerial imagery, geospatial analytics, and AI to identify total-loss properties and route claims to trained disaster specialists. The company said it resolved 90% of property catastrophe claims within 30 days across 2025, despite responding to 62 catastrophe events and over 80,000 catastrophe notices of loss. That performance came against a $2.266 billion first-quarter catastrophe loss, of which $1.7 billion was tied to the California wildfires.
News: Over half of states enact new AI laws
The brief: The NYU Center on Technology Policy reports that as of July 1, more than half of US states have enacted over 100 new AI laws this term, with 109 AI laws and 28 data center laws counted so far. Insurance features directly in the consumer-protection wave. States enacted at least six new laws restricting the use of AI by health insurers, spanning both Republican-led states such as Iowa and Democrat-led states such as Washington. Several states, including Connecticut and Nebraska, also passed laws limiting AI-enabled dynamic pricing. The Center notes that broad algorithmic-discrimination rules have largely collapsed after Colorado scaled back its 2024 AI Act, even as narrower consumer-protection provisions expanded.
News: Four in ten insurers now use AI in underwriting
The brief: A new Sollers Consulting study spanning ten markets reports that 40% of insurers now use AI in underwriting, with the technology reaching a function that historically lagged both management and distribution in digitalization. Sollers identified 126 active AI use cases in the sector, of which 13 focus on underwriting, and noted the sharpest advancements are in commercial insurance, where roughly one-fifth of providers use AI to process data from unstructured documents and triage submissions. Sollers head of underwriting Jakub Śliwiński said extending AI to more complex, lower-volume risks will take another one to two years, since the data foundations still need to be built.
News: Insurance leads all sectors in AI readiness gains
The brief: Accenture's inaugural AI Progress Barometer, which tracks roughly 3,000 of the world's largest companies on a 0-to-100 readiness scale, ranked insurance as the fastest-improving sector globally with an eight-point gain to 48.6 over six months. Ten of the 18 sectors tracked improved overall, with travel (+5.7) and consumer goods (+5.2) trailing insurance. European companies improved 1.6 points versus 1.1 in North America, though North American firms still lead on absolute readiness at 48.9 versus 43.1. Accenture attributed the insurance sector's gain to carriers redesigning workflows around AI rather than layering it on top of existing processes, with clean data and workforce training singled out as prerequisites.
Latest Articles as of July 2
News: Carriers win approval to exclude AI liability
The brief: State regulators across all 50 states have approved carrier requests to exclude AI from standard liability policies, with more than 80% of such requests cleared. Major writers including Berkshire Hathaway, Chubb, and Travelers have won approval to strip AI-caused damages from corporate coverage, and standardized ISO general liability forms now offer a clean generative AI exclusion. Insurers point to the lack of loss history as the reason they cannot yet price the exposure.
News: Cyber insurance loss ratio rises again
The brief: AM Best reports the US cyber insurance loss ratio rose for a second straight year to 53 in 2025, its first reading above 50 since the pandemic ransomware spike. Premium was essentially flat, and the first quarter of 2026 marked the eighth consecutive quarter of pricing cuts, which AM Best says will make the rising loss ratio hard to reverse. Third-party claims are trending up about 30% and carry a longer tail, adding uncertainty to future losses. Surplus lines carriers, now nearly two-thirds of cyber premium, are positioned to absorb much of that development.
News: AI hallucinations in court raise insurer exposure
The brief: A legal analysis says that generative AI hallucinations in court filings are creating fresh exposure for insurers writing lawyers professional liability, E&O, and cyber cover. It points to a recent case where solicitors referred themselves to their regulator after the court was misled by AI-generated citations, with the judge focused on supervision and verification failures. The firm argues courts and regulators are treating AI errors as process failures rather than technology surprises. For insurers, that pushes AI risk management beyond underwriting models into panel counsel oversight, audit rights, and policy wording.
News: Data center build-out raises workers' comp exposure
The brief: The race to build AI data centers is deepening the US skilled-labor shortage, pushing contractors to hire and train less experienced workers faster, which a Zurich executive links to higher workers' compensation exposure. First-year employees consistently show higher injury rates, so carriers are working with contractors and brokers on loss control for the projects that need the most skilled trades. Zurich reports the strain is showing up mainly in scheduling and project delays rather than poorer workmanship. The insurer is also deploying job-site video analysis from construction technology firm Aerosite to flag unsafe behavior during the highest-risk phases.
News: NAIC breach pauses insurer investment designations
The brief The NAIC said an attacker exploited a zero-day vulnerability in Oracle PeopleSoft to reach part of its environment on June 11, as part of a broad campaign hitting many organizations, and has since published the stolen data. Based on findings to date, the exposed data included already-public statutory financial filings and credit rating agency determinations on insurer investments, with no current evidence that personal or financial account information was taken. State insurance department systems and core regulatory filing platforms including SERFF, OPTins, and UCAA were not compromised. Because some credit rating agencies paused their data feeds, the NAIC temporarily suspended assigning designations to insurer investments and told insurers to watch AVS+ for updates.
News: AI pushes tech risk up boardroom agendas
The brief: A Clyde & Co survey of 700 senior decision-makers across 11 industries found 86% now rate technological risk as high impact, up from 46% a year ago, the largest jump of any category. A Clyde & Co partner said AI governance frameworks struggle to keep pace, since a framework that looks mature today can be out of date tomorrow. Nearly three-quarters cited technology implementation and systems integration among their greatest operational challenges, and more than half expect tech adoption including AI to pose significant risk over the next year. Geopolitical risk also climbed sharply, with 72% reporting direct commercial impact versus about half in 2025.
