The emerging "agentic web" envisions large populations of autonomous agents coordinating, transacting, and delegating across open networks. Yet many agent communication and commerce protocols treat agents as low-cost identities, despite the empirical reality that LLM agents remain unreliable, hallucinated, manipulable, and vulnerable to prompt-injection and tool-abuse. A natural response is "agents-at-stake": binding economically meaningful, slashable collateral to persistent identities and adjudicating misbehavior with verifiable evidence. However, heterogeneous tasks make universal verification brittle and centralization-prone, while traditional reputation struggles under rapid model drift and opaque internal states. We propose a protocol-native alternative: insured agents. Specialized insurer agents post stake on behalf of operational agents in exchange for premiums, and receive privileged, privacy-preserving audit access via TEEs to assess claims. A hierarchical insurer market calibrates stake through pricing, decentralizes verification via competitive underwriting, and yields incentive-compatible dispute resolution.

This paper presents a proof-of-concept demonstration of agent-to-agent communication across distributed systems, using only natural-language messages and without shared identifiers, structured schemas, or centralised data exchange. The prototype explores how multiple organisations (represented here as a Clinic, Insurer, and Specialist Network) can cooperate securely via pseudonymised case tokens, local data lookups, and controlled operational boundaries. The system uses Orpius as the underlying platform for multi-agent orchestration, tool execution, and privacy-preserving communication. All agents communicate through OperationRelay calls, exchanging concise natural-language summaries. Each agent operates on its own data (such as synthetic clinic records, insurance enrolment tables, and clinical guidance extracts), and none receives or reconstructs patient identity. The Clinic computes an HMAC-based pseudonymous token, the Insurer evaluates coverage rules and consults the Specialist agent, and the Specialist returns an appropriateness recommendation. The goal of this prototype is intentionally limited: to demonstrate feasibility, not to provide a clinically validated, production-ready system. No clinician review was conducted, and no evaluation beyond basic functional runs was performed. The work highlights architectural patterns, privacy considerations, and communication flows that enable distributed reasoning among specialised agents while keeping data local to each organisation. We conclude by outlining opportunities for more rigorous evaluation and future research in decentralised multi-agent systems.

Generative AI is supercharging insurance fraud by making it easier to falsify accident evidence at scale and in rapid time. Insurance fraud is a pervasive and costly problem, amounting to tens of billions of dollars in losses each year. In the vehicle insurance sector, fraud schemes have traditionally involved staged accidents, exaggerated damage, or forged documents. The rise of generative AI, including deepfake image and video generation, has introduced new methods for committing fraud at scale. Fraudsters can now fabricate highly realistic crash photos, damage evidence, and even fake identities or documents with minimal effort, exploiting AI tools to bolster false insurance claims. Insurers have begun deploying countermeasures such as AI-based deepfake detection software and enhanced verification processes to detect and mitigate these AI-driven scams. However, current mitigation strategies face significant limitations. Detection tools can suffer from false positives and negatives, and sophisticated fraudsters continuously adapt their tactics to evade automated checks. This cat-and-mouse arms race between generative AI and detection technology, combined with resource and cost barriers for insurers, means that combating AI-enabled insurance fraud remains an ongoing challenge. In this white paper, we present UVeye layered solution for vehicle fraud, representing a major leap forward in the ability to detect, mitigate and deter this new wave of fraud.

In this work, we highlight the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) and agentic AI, in the insurance sector. We consider and emphasize the unique opportunities, challenges, and potential pathways in insurance amid rapid performance improvements, increased open-source access, decreasing deployment costs, and the complexity of LLM or agentic AI frameworks. To bring it closer to home, we identify critical gaps in the African insurance market and highlight key local efforts, players, and partnership opportunities. Finally, we call upon actuaries, insurers, regulators, and tech leaders to a collaborative effort aimed at creating inclusive, sustainable, and equitable AI strategies and solutions: by and for Africans.

InsurTech refers to the use of state-of-the-art technology, including both emerging hardware and software, to address inefficiencies across the insurance value chain and further explore new opportunities to reshape traditional business operations. InsurTech encompasses a broad spectrum of technology-driven innovations, including, but not limited to, telematics, usage-based insurance, and the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors. In this study, we focus on a specific class of InsurTech, an Insurtech data vendor, that provides insurance companies with next-generation data solutions. We leverage new and diverse external data sources, such as social media data and online content, to enrich the internal database, thereby empowering actuarial analytics and gaining more accurate insights into risk profiles and policyholder behavior. Specifically, by integrating alternative data sources beyond traditional information, insurance companies can uncover previously unrecognized risk factors, reduce bias in existing features, and identify more accurate risk exposures based on the operational characteristics of the insured entities.

This paper develops a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework for reinsurance treaty bidding, addressing long-standing inefficiencies in traditional broker-mediated placement processes. We pose the core research question: Can autonomous, learning-based bidding systems improve risk transfer efficiency and outperform conventional pricing approaches in reinsurance markets? In our model, each reinsurer is represented by an adaptive agent that iteratively refines its bidding strategy within a competitive, partially observable environment. The simulation explicitly incorporates institutional frictions including broker intermediation, incumbent advantages, last-look privileges, and asymmetric access to underwriting information. Empirical analysis demonstrates that MARL agents achieve up to 15% higher underwriting profit, 20% lower tail risk (CVaR), and over 25% improvement in Sharpe ratios relative to actuarial and heuristic baselines. Sensitivity tests confirm robustness across hyperparameter settings, and stress testing reveals strong resilience under simulated catastrophe shocks and capital constraints. These findings suggest that MARL offers a viable path toward more transparent, adaptive, and risk-sensitive reinsurance markets. The proposed framework contributes to emerging literature at the intersection of algorithmic market design, strategic bidding, and AI-enabled financial decision-making.

In settings where ML models are used to inform the allocation of resources, agents affected by the allocation decisions might have an incentive to strategically change their features to secure better outcomes. While prior work has studied strategic responses broadly, disentangling misreporting from genuine modification remains a fundamental challenge. In this paper, we propose a causally-motivated approach to identify and quantify how much an agent misreports on average by distinguishing deceptive changes in their features from genuine modification. Our key insight is that, unlike genuine modification, misreported features do not causally affect downstream variables (i.e., causal descendants). We exploit this asymmetry by comparing the causal effect of misreported features on their causal descendants as derived from manipulated datasets against those from unmanipulated datasets. We formally prove identifiability of the misreporting rate and characterize the variance of our estimator. We empirically validate our theoretical results using a semi-synthetic and real Medicare dataset with misreported data, demonstrating that our approach can be employed to identify misreporting in real-world scenarios.

Fairness has emerged as a critical consideration in the landscape of machine learning algorithms, particularly as AI continues to transform decision-making across societal domains. To ensure that these algorithms are free from bias and do not discriminate against individuals based on sensitive attributes such as gender and race, the field of algorithmic bias has introduced various fairness concepts, along with methodologies to achieve these notions in different contexts. Despite the rapid advancement, not all sectors have embraced these fairness principles to the same extent. One specific sector that merits attention in this regard is insurance. Within the realm of insurance pricing, fairness is defined through a distinct and specialized framework. Consequently, achieving fairness according to established notions does not automatically ensure fair pricing in insurance. In particular, regulators are increasingly emphasizing transparency in pricing algorithms and imposing constraints on insurance companies on the collection and utilization of sensitive consumer attributes. These factors present additional challenges in the implementation of fairness in pricing algorithms. To address these complexities and comply with regulatory demands, we propose an efficient method for constructing fair models that are tailored to the insurance domain, using only privatized sensitive attributes. Notably, our approach ensures statistical guarantees, does not require direct access to sensitive attributes, and adapts to varying transparency requirements, addressing regulatory demands while ensuring fairness in insurance pricing.

The entropic risk measure is widely used in high-stakes decision making to account for tail risks associated with an uncertain loss. With limited data, the empirical entropic risk estimator, i.e. replacing the expectation in the entropic risk measure with a sample average, underestimates the true risk. To mitigate the bias in the empirical entropic risk estimator, we propose a strongly asymptotically consistent bootstrapping procedure. The first step of the procedure involves fitting a distribution to the data, whereas the second step estimates the bias of the empirical entropic risk estimator using bootstrapping, and corrects for it. Two methods are proposed to fit a Gaussian Mixture Model to the data, a computationally intensive one that fits the distribution of empirical entropic risk, and a simpler one with a component that fits the tail of the empirical distribution. As an application of our approach, we study distributionally robust entropic risk minimization problems with type-$\infty$ Wasserstein ambiguity set and apply our bias correction to debias validation performance. Furthermore, we propose a distributionally robust optimization model for an insurance contract design problem that takes into account the correlations of losses across households. We show that choosing regularization parameters based on the cross validation methods can result in significantly higher out-of-sample risk for the insurer if the bias in validation performance is not corrected for. This improvement in performance can be explained from the observation that our methods suggest a higher (and more accurate) premium to homeowners.

Police are closing in on the suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a New York hotel, the city's mayor has said. New York Mayor Eric Adams said on Sunday that the "net is tightening" around the suspected gunman, who is believed by authorities to have left the city after the killing. "The manner in which they were able to follow his footsteps, to recover evidence – some of it is known, some of it is unknown – but the net is tightening. And we are going to bring this person to justice," Adams told reporters. Asked if authorities had confirmed the suspect's name, Adams declined to comment on his identity.