Original text here from Patrice Bernard (LinkedIn)
The promises of artificial intelligence have sparked a massive wave of creativity among entrepreneurs worldwide, but it's quickly tempered by the underlying risks. Who better than a specialist in insurance for technology startups could understand the emerging challenges and provide the right solution?
Just as the most emblematic examples of disruption, such as climate change and the advent of autonomous vehicles, the infiltration of AI into various domains – including its possible teething problems, its potential impacts on sensitive activities, and the uncertainties it introduces in determining responsibilities – is challenging traditional coverage and necessitating a serious reassessment.
This is the mission that Vouch is now taking on. Its ambition is to provide tailored insurance for American companies developing and marketing solutions based on "large language models" (LLMs) and other categories of artificial intelligence. Specifically, it unequivocally covers risks that existing liability products do not explicitly include, thereby addressing gray areas as well as entirely new risks.
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This encompasses not only potential malfunctions, outages, and technical errors, as with any software component but also all the repercussions of biases, discrimination, hallucinations, regulatory violations, intellectual property infringements, whether the damages are proven and result in losses or involve defending against a lawsuit brought by a third party, either against the publisher itself or one of its clients.
In practical terms, the examples mentioned range from copyright-related complaints, which have been prevalent in recent weeks, to the scenario of an automated medical analysis system rendering an incorrect, critical judgment affecting a patient's health, or a savings chatbot making recommendations resulting in unanticipated losses. Such cases will likely be denied coverage under the policies currently in place.
Honestly, it seems difficult to imagine how Vouch manages to create a viable contract, given the limited industry experience regarding AI-induced claims and their potential scope, as well as the legal treatment of corresponding cases. It is likely that its terms and costs will evolve with experience. Nonetheless, this initiative signals the insurance sector's need for extreme responsiveness to the changing world.
In a context where many large corporations, particularly in finance, are experimenting with AI but are hesitant to industrialize it due to the countless lurking dangers, the fact that the involved partners hold dedicated coverage is a crucial factor in building trust and mitigating concerns. This benefits both the providers (and their revenue) and innovation in general.
