In January 2026, the body that writes the standard policy language most US insurers build on added a new endorsement. Form CG 40 47 strips bodily injury, property damage and advertising injury arising out of generative AI from a commercial general liability policy. W. R. Berkley went further with what it calls an absolute AI exclusion, reaching professional liability and directors and officers cover. No announcement went out. The change arrives as a form number on your renewal.
Why It Matters
Lawyers have a name for what just ended. Silent AI: the years when AI risk sat covered in cyber and professional liability because nobody had thought to exclude it. Gallagher Re, working with MIT, measured what that silence absorbed. Generative AI lawsuits of every kind grew 978% in the US between 2021 and 2025, and the rate is still climbing. Gallagher also asked 1,250 companies what most worried them about AI. The leading answer, at 57%, was errors and hallucinations. A hallucination that costs a client money was never a general liability claim. It lands on professional liability, and that is the line now being rewritten.
The Decision
Nobody reads their own policy wording, and until this year that was sensible. Your carrier has decided how it treats AI risk without asking you. You can carry that exposure knowingly, or move it somewhere that will still pay. Both cost something. Only one is a decision you made.
What To Do This Week
- Send your broker one sentence. Ask whether any policy you hold, general liability, professional liability or cyber, now carries a generative AI exclusion. Ask for the form number, not a reassurance.
- Name the two places AI already touches work that reaches a customer. Ask which policy responds if that output causes a loss.
- Put your renewal date in your calendar sixty days early. That is when the form changes, and when you can still push back.
What Not To Do
Do not buy standalone AI cover before reading what your existing policies exclude. It is priced for people who have not looked. Do not assume light AI use protects you. These exclusions are written around AI in the output, not AI as something you purchased, which is why one policyholder lawyer asked what would be left if everything contains AI. And do not delegate this away. Your insurer has decided. You have not.
Signal Boost
Fenwick, The End of Silent AI - two insurance lawyers on how the cover disappears, and where it goes quiet: revised base forms and application questions, not one obvious exclusion.