Artificial intelligence has rocketed to the number two spot on the Allianz Risk Barometer's annual ranking of global business risks, climbing eight positions in a single year — a jump that risk analysts call unprecedented for any single category in the survey's history.
The 2026 report, which surveys over 3,700 risk management professionals across 106 countries, identifies AI-related concerns as second only to cyber incidents. The primary drivers behind the jump are fears about system reliability failures, autonomous liability gaps — particularly where AI makes decisions without clear human accountability — and the reputational fallout from high-profile AI errors in healthcare, finance, and legal services.
"Companies are now grappling with the reality that deploying AI at scale creates new categories of risk that insurance and legal frameworks haven't caught up to," the report notes. Industries including healthcare, financial services, and transportation ranked AI risk highest, citing the cost of a single catastrophic autonomous decision as potentially exceeding all the efficiency gains from an AI deployment.