Ex-Anthropic executive raises $15M to insure enterprise AI deployments

Former Anthropic executive Rune Kvist has launched The Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company (AIUC) with $15 million in seed funding to provide insurance coverage for AI agent deployments in enterprises. The startup addresses a critical trust gap preventing companies from adopting AI systems due to fears of catastrophic failures, offering both insurance policies and rigorous safety standards that could accelerate enterprise AI adoption while maintaining accountability.

The big picture: AIUC combines insurance coverage with independent safety audits to give enterprises confidence in deploying AI agents for tasks like customer service, coding, and data analysis—creating a market-based solution that moves faster than traditional regulation.

How the funding breaks down: The seed round was led by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman through NFDG, with participation from Emergence Capital, Terrain, and notable angels including Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann and former security executives from Google Cloud and MongoDB.

Why enterprises need this: Companies face a difficult choice between competitive irrelevance and reputational disaster when deploying AI systems.

• “On the one hand, you can stay on the sidelines and watch your competitors make you irrelevant, or you can lean in and risk making headlines for having your chatbot spew Nazi propaganda, or hallucinating your refund policy, or discriminating against the people you’re trying to recruit,” Kvist explained.

What you should know: AIUC has created the “AIUC-1 standard”—essentially “SOC 2 for AI agents”—covering six categories: safety, security, reliability, accountability, data privacy, and societal risks.

• The company extensively tests AI systems by trying to break them thousands of times, attempting to get systems to behave inappropriately or leak sensitive data.
• Standards will be updated quarterly rather than following years-long regulatory cycles, allowing them to keep pace with AI’s rapid development.

In plain English: SOC 2 is a widely-used cybersecurity standard that companies typically require from vendors before sharing sensitive data—think of it as a security report card that proves a company follows proper data protection practices.

Early validation: Major AI companies are already using AIUC’s certification process to unlock enterprise deals.

• The startup has certified AI agents for unicorn companies Ada, a customer support platform, and Cognition, a coding assistant company.
• “Ada, we help them unlock a deal with the top five social media company where we came in and ran independent tests on the risks that this company cared about, and that helped unlock that deal, basically giving them the confidence that this could actually be shown to their customers,” Kvist said.

Insurance partnerships: AIUC is developing relationships with established insurers, including Lloyd’s of London, to provide financial backing for policies.

• “The insurance policies are going to be backed by the balance sheets of the big insurers,” Kvist explained, addressing concerns about trusting a startup with major liability coverage.
• Coverage includes data breaches, discriminatory practices, intellectual property infringement, and incorrect automated decisions.

Historical precedent: The approach draws on Benjamin Franklin’s 1752 creation of America’s first fire insurance company, which led to building codes and safety standards that preceded government regulation.

• “Throughout history, insurance has been the right model for this, and the reason is that insurers have an incentive to tell the truth,” Kvist noted.
• The same pattern emerged with automobile safety, where insurers created crash testing standards and incentivized safety features years before government mandates.

The founding team: AIUC brings together deep AI and risk management expertise.

• Kvist was Anthropic’s first product and go-to-market hire in early 2022 and sits on the Center for AI Safety board.
• Co-founder Brandon Wang is a Thiel Fellow with consumer underwriting experience, while Rajiv Dattani is a former McKinsey partner who led global insurance work and served as COO of METR, a nonprofit that evaluates leading AI models.

Strategic partnerships: The company works with a consortium including PwC, one of the “Big Four” accounting firms, law firm Orrick, and academics from Stanford and MIT to develop and validate standards.

Competitive urgency: The narrowing gap between US and Chinese AI capabilities makes rapid but safe deployment increasingly critical.

• “A year and a half ago, everyone would say, like, we’re two years ahead now, that sounds like eight months, something like that,” Kvist observed.
• The EU AI Act, started in 2021, exemplifies how traditional regulatory cycles struggle to keep pace with AI development.

What they’re saying: Kvist frames the challenge as a fundamental societal question about managing transformative technology.

• “The question that really interested me is: how, as a society, are we going to deal with this technology that’s washing over us? I think building AI, which is what Anthropic is doing, is very exciting and will do a lot of good for the world. But the most central question that gets me up in the morning is: how, as a society, are we going to deal with this?”