Insurance as AI Risk Infrastructure: A Generative-Agent Simulation of AI Adoption
Organizations: University of Macau · Fudan University · Immunocan AI · European Commission ·
Abstract
The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) tools has demonstrated immense potential to enhance societal well-being and operational efficiency. However, the inherent unreliability and uncertain operational consequences of modern AI systems, typified by large language models (LLMs), have created a significant barrier to enterprise adoption. Many enterprises remain hesitant to integrate these tools deeply into their workflows due to concerns about unpredictable losses and liability exposure. While existing technical safeguards primarily seek to reduce the likelihood or severity of AI-enabled workflow failures, they do not by themselves provide ex post financial protection when residual pecuniary tail losses materialize. In this paper, we introduce a socio-economic framework that complements these safeguards by transferring and absorbing the residual financial consequences of AI adoption through insurance. To evaluate this framework, we develop an LLM-driven agent-based social simulation (LABSS) system. We assess the behavioral validity of the simulation using established economic and sociological theories. Our analysis demonstrates that the proposed insurance framework reduces firm-level financial exposure, thereby accelerating the aggregate adoption of AI tools and improving firm solvency and aggregate capital.
Figures & tables
| Item | Test | Statistic | Null hypothesis | Result | Decision |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| M1. Bounded attention | Menu-conformance audit | , | , | ; | Reject |
| M2. Peer diffusion | Peer-response regression | ; all | Reject | ||
| M3. Contract inertia | Renewal-gate and retention audit | , | : no expiry gate or incumbent retention | ; – | Reject |
| M4. Heterogeneity | Heterogeneity F-test | , partial | : traits and industry add no fit | ; ; partial | Reject |
| Item | Test | Statistic | Null hypothesis | Result | Decision |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| H1a. Active stock | Trajectory model comparison | , | paths updates; mean , | Reject | |
| H1b. Entry S-curve | Trajectory model comparison | , , peak | paths updates; mean , ; peak days – | Reject | |
| H1c. Risk-transfer lead | Paired seed-endpoint contrast | , , | pairs; pp; ; | Reject | |
| H1d. Digital timing | Within-seed trajectory-label permutation | , | firms/seed; updates; | Reject | |
| H1e. AI size order | Within-seed trajectory-label permutation | , | firms/seed; ; | Reject | |
| H2a. Product diffusion | Coverage trajectory fit | Coverage, | : no product-diffusion structure | paths updates; active , entry | Reject |
Appendix figures & tables16 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Parameter block | Exact formal setting |
|---|---|
| Population and horizon | 300 buyer firms, comprising 197 small, 69 medium, and 34 large firms; 11 sectors; a 300-calendar-day horizon with one operational update every three days; paired seeds 42, 77, and 202; four AI vendors; four private insurers and one residual backstop. |
| Sector allocation | Communication services 28; consumer discretionary 36; consumer staples 26; energy 19; financials 32; health care 24; industrials 31; information technology 37; materials 19; real estate 24; utilities 24. |
| Firm cash and returns | Initial cash ; traditional return mean , standard deviation , lower cap , and upper cap ; AI gain scale ; AI gain risk drag . |
| Peer-information network | 12 same-sector and 4 cross-sector neighbors, minimum degree 10, and recent-claim window 7 operational updates. |
| Vendor attention | The visible set contains at most three vendors. One slot is sampled uniformly from the full vendor pool, and the remaining slots are sampled without replacement using the Phase 3 visibility probability. Sector affinity equals 1.00 for a targeted sector, 0.75 for an all-sector vendor, and 0.35 otherwise; baseline visibility is . A numerical weight floor of 0.01 is applied in the implementation and is nonbinding under the formal vendor profiles. |
| Event and loss mapping | Risk-score floor ; loss realization ; action-loss scale ; catastrophic threshold ; tail multiplier coefficient ; material-loss ratio ; claimable-loss ratio ; minimum claimable-loss ratio ; material-event score threshold ; claimable-event score threshold . |
| Vendor | Fee | Productivity lift | Risk multiplier | Reputation | Marketing weight | Target sectors |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alpha | 2800 | 0.0110 | 0.62 | 0.78 | 1.05 | Financials, energy, and health care |
| Beta | 2200 | 0.0130 | 0.82 | 0.68 | 0.95 | Information technology, communication services, and consumer discretionary |
| Gamma | 1600 | 0.0125 | 1.10 | 0.63 | 0.95 | Industrials, materials, and utilities |
| Delta | 1200 | 0.0120 | 1.05 | 0.62 | 1.25 | All sectors |
| Insurer archetype | Capacity | Floor/soft/hard | Target sectors and role | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Diversified commercial | 6.5 | 0.38 | 0.62 | 0.045 | 0.85 | 0.34 | 0.64 | 0.11 | 115 | 0.22/0.68/0.42 | All sectors; private |
| Mutual commercial | 4.2 | 0.30 | 0.58 | 0.028 | 0.90 | 0.30 | 0.59 | 0.10 | 45 | 0.24/0.72/0.46 | Consumer discretionary, consumer staples, real estate, and utilities; private |
| Digital commercial | 3.8 | 0.32 | 0.66 | 0.030 | 0.85 | 0.30 | 0.56 | 0.08 | 75 | 0.23/0.70/0.44 | Information technology, communication services, and financials; private |
| Specialty technology | 3.0 | 0.45 | 0.52 | 0.050 | 0.95 | 0.34 | 0.74 | 0.15 | 45 | 0.26/0.76/0.50 | Information technology, health care, financials, and communication services; private |
| Residual backstop | 9.0 | 0.60 | 0.35 | 0.025 | 1.20 | 0.50 | 0.55 | 0.20 | 0.30/0.80/0.58 | All sectors; residual facility |
| AutoCLAW evidence | Enterprise balance-sheet channel | Simulation variable | Insurance channel |
|---|---|---|---|
| Failed report generation, rewriting, or constrained summarization | Rework cost, decision delay, client-facing quality loss, and compliance exposure | Incident flag, severity, direct loss, total loss, and risk score | Eligible loss enters deductible, coinsurance, and limit schedule if the incident score exceeds the policy threshold |
| Directory audit or file-cleanup error | Lost files, restoration labor, workflow interruption, and access-control remediation | Direct loss and tail multiplier when the maximum risk score crosses the tail threshold | Claim payment is capped by policy limit and insurer solvency floor |
| Record update, CSV update, or email drafting failure | Data inconsistency, erroneous communication, operational correction cost, and reputational pressure | Material event signal, claimable loss signal, panic input, and memory update | Paid claims reduce liquidity trauma, while uncovered claimable losses strengthen loss and claimable-loss memory |
| Clustered high-score task failures within a firm-cycle | Short-run liquidity pressure and bankruptcy risk when cash buffers are thin | Realized operational loss , cash update, bankruptcy flag, and social total capital | Insurance changes timing and allocation of the loss, not the occurrence of the underlying AI failure |
| Mechanism | Baseline | Sensitivity range | Role in the simulation |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI productivity scale | to | Converts active AI use into productivity gain, common to both insurance arms | |
| AI operational-loss scale | to | Converts AutoCLAW task loss into realized firm balance-sheet loss | |
| Loss realization rate | Fixed in the reported sweep | Keeps the task-to-cash conversion common across paired counterfactuals | |
| Insurance pricing multiplier | to | Loads expected loss, stress loss, expenses, and capital costs into premiums | |
| Coverage and deductible shifts | , | to , to | Controls how much tail loss is retained by firms versus indemnified by insurers |
| Policy-limit multiplier | Fixed in the reported sweep | Scales insurer-specific policy limits |
| Component | Recorded specification |
|---|---|
| Model checkpoint | Qwen/Qwen3-8B snapshot b968826d9c46dd6066d109eabc6255188de91218 , served as qwen3-agent-local . The tokenizer and native string-format chat template are loaded from the same snapshot; no custom chat template is supplied. |
| Serving stack | vLLM 0.10.2, Transformers 4.55.2, Tokenizers 0.21.4, PyTorch 2.8.0 with CUDA 12.8, and Python 3.11.15. Eight independent single-GPU replicas run on NVIDIA H100 80GB devices with BF16 weights, no quantization, tensor parallel size one, maximum context length 8192, GPU-memory utilization 0.82, and a maximum of 16 concurrent sequences per replica. |
| Decoding | Temperature 0.0; top-p, top-k, and a per-request model seed are not supplied by the client; the vLLM engine seed is 0. Maximum response length is 220 tokens for decisions and negotiations; request timeout is 30 seconds; response format is a JSON object; reasoning is disabled with the /no_think suffix. |
| Paired routing | Seeds 42, 77, and 202 pair firm initialization, AutoCLAW records, random exposure, and endpoint assignment. A stable hash of the seed and call identity, including decision or negotiation type, firm, cycle, round, and side when applicable, and repair attempt, selects one of the eight workers. |
| JSON parser | The parser first accepts a complete JSON object and then attempts extraction from the first opening to the last closing brace. Failed extraction triggers at most two repair prompts. Enumerated actions, vendor identifiers, policy tiers, integer terms, and negotiation prices are subsequently validated or bounded by the simulator. |
| Failure policy | Runtime and transport fallback are disabled in the formal configuration. If all JSON repair attempts fail, the implementation permits a deterministic rule response for that recoverable parse error and records the reason. |
| Call | Eligibility and additional state | Required output | Simulator enforcement |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI adoption | Active non-user outside cooldown; up to three visible vendors; procurement-stage and local-evidence state | adopt_ai , adoption_score , reason, selected vendor, vendor term, maximum rounds | Dynamic threshold clipped to ; score must also clear a 0.026 margin; selected vendor must be visible; term is bounded to 14–120 operational updates. For first adoption, a proposed term above 60 updates requires a score margin of at least 0.08. |
| Vendor renewal | Vendor contract expired at the current operational update; incumbent identifier and all visible alternatives are supplied | Same schema as adoption | Expiry opens a neutral review window. Dynamic renewal threshold is clipped to , with a 0.045 margin. The incumbent has no prompt-imposed priority. |
| Insurance purchase or renewal | Active AI exposure and no active policy; prior-policy flag, remaining AI term, risk signal, and risk-need reference | buy_insurance , insurance_score , reason, policy term, maximum rounds | Purchase threshold 0.39; prior-policy discount 0.09; lower bound 0.27. The formal decision menu bounds the policy term to 1–90 operational updates and the remaining AI exposure. Quote production and actuarial pricing remain rule-based. |
| Exposure management | Active AI exposure; lagged risk signal, memories, panic, contract state, and allowed actions | abandon_ai , abandon_score , reason, and vendor_action | Threshold 0.62. Score and action are made consistent after parsing; the only valid actions are keep_vendor and abandon_ai . |
| Vendor bargaining | Triggered after adoption or renewal; firm and vendor states, current ask, floor, prior offers, term, side, and round limits | Decision, monthly fee, and message | Seller actions are accept/counter/reject; buyer actions are accept/counter/quit. Prices and rounds are bounded by the configured floor, affordability, minimum rounds, and 30-round cap. |
| Insurance bargaining | Triggered after purchase intent and quote selection; firm, selected quote, policy menu, risk need, offers, side, and round limits | Decision, premium, message, and optional valid tier | The same action sets apply. Tier must belong to the generated policy menu; premium and rounds are bound before a contract can be formed. |
| Control block | Effective values |
|---|---|
| Adoption threshold | Base 0.665; offset 0.043; clamp ; maturity index 106 operational updates; early friction 0.147; local-evidence floor/reference ; evidence lag 48 updates; low-evidence friction 0.078; implementation uncertainty 0.064; local-evidence relief 0.092 with power 1.5; pioneer discount 0.145; inertia penalty 0.056; urgency, innovativeness, and dependence discounts ; panic penalty 0.055; loss and claimable-memory penalties ; insurance-confidence discount 0.01; required margin 0.026. |
| Risk-transfer evidence | Evidence gate 0.20; insurance-availability floor 0.15; local insured-peer weight 0.70; recent paid-claim weight 0.20; paid-claim reference rate 0.015; direct panic dampening of the local-adoption signal 0.00. These values modify the credibility of peer adoption evidence rather than directly forcing adoption. |
| Renewal threshold | Base 0.46; offset 0.05; clamp ; loss-memory, claimable-memory, and panic penalties ; insurance-confidence discount 0.03; continuity term inertia; required margin 0.045. |
| Insurance intent and reference | Model purchase threshold 0.39; prior-policy threshold discount 0.09; minimum threshold 0.27. The state reference and deterministic parse-fallback score has base 0.06, prior-policy bonus 0.24, and weights for claimable event, material event, risk memory, claimable memory, industry incident, industry stress, industry loss, panic, recent claims, peer coverage, risk aversion, and AI dependence of , with innovativeness discount 0.07. Fallback term thresholds are 0.70 and 0.38; dependence and risk-tolerance thresholds are 0.62 and 0.50. |
| Exposure and quote choice | Model abandonment threshold 0.62; prompt-reference weights on material event, claimable event, loss memory, claimable memory, panic, and risk tolerance . Maximum and target premium cash shares ; quote price sensitivity 0.24; deductible weight 0.22; minimum quote utility ; backstop threshold 0.62 and utility penalty 0.16. |
| Mechanism family | Perturbation | Adoption gap (pp) | Social capital gap (idx) | Bankruptcies avoided | Panic reduction |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI value | Low | 10.91 | 1.02 | 2 | 1.73 |
| AI value | High | 8.89 | 2.32 | 2 | 1.67 |
| AI loss severity | Low | 11.54 | 1.11 | 2 | 1.29 |
| AI loss severity | High | 6.24 | 1.49 | 2 | 2.15 |
| Insurance price | Low | 7.15 | 1.91 | 1 | 1.71 |
| Insurance price | High | 6.76 | 1.72 | 0 | 1.54 |
| Component | Formal specification |
|---|---|
| Run scope | 300 firms over the 300-calendar-day horizon with one operational update every three days; base seed 42; four independent one-GPU shards; eight concurrent episodes per shard; profile-based task counts capped at five per firm update; and at most two runner retries. |
| Executor | Qwen/Qwen3-8B served through a local vLLM endpoint with context length 8192. The launcher specification pins [email protected] , permits at most 12 AutoCLAW tool iterations, and applies a 240-second episode timeout. |
| Reproducible sampling | A firm-update generator is initialized from the first 16 hexadecimal digits of . Task count and task family follow the fixed sector profile, with weighted sampling without replacement whenever the requested count does not exceed the available task families. |
| Difficulty policy | Mixed difficulty with probabilities 0.10 easy, 0.55 calibrated, and 0.35 stress. Calibrated and stress episodes use the same explicit task instruction, while stress workspaces contain stronger distractors or conflicting local instructions. |
| Verification and judge | A task-specific deterministic verifier checks required artifacts, immutable fields, exact constraints, unauthorized changes, and policy violations. The formal run uses deterministic_verifier_rule_v1 ; no LLM judge assigns incident class, severity, or monetary loss. |
| Update synchronization | Completed task episodes are aggregated by firm and aligned with the corresponding operational update before incident, loss, and risk variables enter the simulation. Episodes that exhaust runner retries are retained in the error file rather than labeled as operational incidents. A firm update with no completed task is flagged and zero-filled. Task, firm-update, industry, selected-firm, error, and quality-report records are retained together, with cycle identifying the operational update. |
| Task family | Prompted artifact and principal verifier target | Task factor |
|---|---|---|
| Report generation | Create report.txt from notes with the exact Revenue, Costs, and Operations headings; preserve verified numeric facts, exclude outdated numbers and slogans, and create any requested structured companion file. | 0.8 |
| Constrained summary | Create summary.txt from source and requirements files while satisfying every wording, formatting, and exclusion constraint. | 0.8 |
| Document rewrite | Rewrite draft.txt as a board-ready note while preserving stated revenue pressure, the 7 percent cost target, and 91 percent customer retention, and removing source meta-instructions. | 0.9 |
| Email draft | Create email_draft.txt with the required operational points while excluding confidential information and rejecting conflicting shortcut requests. | 0.9 |
| Directory audit | Recursively inspect incoming , follow audit_rules.txt , report every required unusual file in the prescribed format, and leave source files unchanged. | 1.0 |
| CSV update | Apply the requested status change only to cells exactly equal to pending ; preserve headers, amounts, notes, priorities, and row order. | 1.1 |
| Sector | Operational context in the simulation |
|---|---|
| Communication Services | Content operations, customer communication, and high-volume document workflows. |
| Cons. Discretionary | Marketing, order handling, product description, and customer-facing operations. |
| Cons. Staples | Routine reporting, inventory documentation, and compliance style record updates. |
| Energy | Operational reports, safety documentation, and asset maintenance records. |
| Financials | Client communication, risk notes, records, and policy or transaction documentation. |
| Health Care | Administrative documents, patient communication templates, and regulated summaries. |
| Input | Mean | SD | Min | Max |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Asset value | 0.8491 | 0.5473 | 0.2014 | 3.6872 |
| Risk tolerance | 0.4545 | 0.1600 | 0.1591 | 0.8756 |
| Technology urgency | 0.5498 | 0.1598 | 0.1992 | 0.9500 |
| AI dependence | 0.6334 | 0.1132 | 0.3711 | 0.9500 |
| Organizational inertia | 0.5494 | 0.1290 | 0.2802 | 0.8905 |
| Innovativeness | 0.4506 | 0.1290 | 0.1095 | 0.7198 |