"Silent AI" Is the New Silent Cyber

If you've been in the insurance industry long enough, you remember silent cyber. For years, traditional property and casualty policies neither explicitly covered nor excluded cyber-related losses. Carriers were unknowingly accumulating cyber exposure across their books. When the claims started hitting, the industry scrambled to respond.

We're watching the exact same pattern unfold right now — but with AI.

The Silent Cyber Parallel

Silent cyber described a gap: cyber risk existed in policies that never contemplated it. Nobody bought a commercial property policy expecting it to cover a ransomware attack — but nobody explicitly excluded it either. The result was ambiguity, litigation, and massive unexpected losses.

Silent AI is the same dynamic, playing out faster. AI is now embedded in mainstream business tools that most companies use every day. These tools make decisions, generate content, process data, and interact with customers — all in ways that create liability. And most commercial insurance policies were written long before any of this was remotely conceivable.

AI Is Already In Your Stack (Whether You Know It or Not)

When most business owners hear "AI," they think of ChatGPT or building custom models. But AI exposure runs much deeper. Here are six common SaaS tools that ship with AI capabilities your team is probably already using:

Every one of these tools creates potential liability: biased outputs, data mishandling, incorrect automated decisions, and content that could be factually wrong or violate IP rights. And every one of these risks sits in a gray zone that traditional commercial policies were never designed to address.

The Silent Cyber Playbook — And Why AI Is Moving Faster

Here's how the silent cyber crisis unfolded, and how the AI version is tracking against it:

What This Means for Your Business

If your business uses any of the tools listed above — or anything similar — you have AI exposure. That exposure is currently sitting in a gray zone somewhere between your general liability, professional liability, cyber, and EPLI policies. It may or may not be covered, and your carrier may or may not have decided yet.

The worst outcome is finding out you're not covered after a claim hits. The second-worst outcome is having your coverage silently removed at renewal without understanding what you've lost.

The best outcome is getting in front of this now: understanding your exposure, documenting your governance, and securing coverage before the market hardens.