An insurer designed from a blank sheet for AI agents
Breslau started as a thought experiment. Design an insurance company from scratch, with AI doing the work people do today and a business model unlike the one insurers run now. To keep it concrete, the exercise picked a single market: US companies whose AI agents move money.
That market is opening now. Agents can already pay invoices and place orders, and the forms behind standard liability policies now let carriers write generative AI out of cover. Somebody will have to price the risk. Breslau prices every action as it happens and pays claims from a signed record, with people only where the law requires them.
| The brief asked for | The design |
|---|---|
| Built from the ground up | A new line of cover for AI agents that move money |
| A new business model | Premium charged per action, plus a fee for the meter, much like a card network |
| No humans | Nine agents run the work. US law still needs five accountable people. |
| Very profitable | A 41% EBITDA margin in the 2031 base case, on assumptions no one can test yet |
A design on paper hides its weak points, so the parts that could be built were built. The meter runs as working software with 400 passing tests. Behind the numbers on this page sit a pricing model of 40,000 simulated years and a five-year financial model.
Some of it does not hold yet. Nobody has measured how often an agent pays the wrong party, so the rates rest on judgment, and US law puts licensed people at points the design would rather automate. Those limits appear on the page wherever they bite.
Liability insurers can now exclude generative AI
A company whose carrier adopts the new wording carries its agents' mistakes on its own balance sheet.
ISO, the Verisk unit that drafts standard policy forms, has released endorsements that remove generative AI from commercial general liability cover. Carriers are filing to use such wording with state regulators, according to Insurance Journal.
Specialist insurers already sell AI liability cover, priced for the agent as a whole from audits and scheduled tests. Breslau prices each action as the agent takes it, using what the meter records.
A meter in the path keeps a signed record of every call
Customers install the meter and nothing else. Breslau bills premium and settles claims from the log it writes.
The meter
It runs as a gateway between the agent and its tools, or reads from a gateway the company already has. Every entry is chained to the one before and signed. Every ten days the meter checks its log against the bank statement.
The price
Each action adds to the premium. A payment costs basis points of its value and a commitment . The meter itself carries a separate fee of basis point.
The cover
Some losses sit in the log beyond argument, such as a payment made twice or one sent to a party the customer never approved. Breslau would pay those within hours, a design target, then recover the money from whoever received it.
The brake
The meter stops a payment above the agent's limit, a payee nobody approved, a repeat, or a payment split to slip under the limit. Someone at the customer then lets it through or kills it. Policies that switch the brake off pay times the rate.
Illustrative rates, shown in full
A basis point is one hundredth of one percent. An agent's examined score moves every rate between 0.7 and 2.2 times base.
| Action | What it covers | Base rate |
|---|---|---|
| Pay | Moving money | bp of value |
| Commit | Placing orders and signing contracts | bp of value |
| Message | Messages to people outside the company | $ per 1,000 |
| Write | Changing a record | $ per 1,000 |
| Read | Retrieving records | $ per 1,000 |
| Authorization fee | Charged on payments and commitments to run the meter | bp of value |
The error figure is the low end of the 0.1 to 0.5% of spend that one recovery audit firm reports for duplicates and overpayments in human-run payables. Nobody has published the figure for agents.
Shown in basis points on a log scale. Nobody publishes how often an AI agent pays the wrong party, so the scenarios start from data on human payment errors and fraud, and every step after that is judgment. With the brake on, the low and high scenarios sit a hundredfold apart.
What the pricing model expects to pay
A simulation of 1,000 policies over 40,000 years, run at the plan rates. Hover any mark for its value.
A small company on a large flow
Figures come from the financial model's base case, built from the rating plan and the assumptions written out in the workbook.
The meter already runs and has been stress-tested
Written in plain JavaScript with no outside packages.
In its end-to-end demo the meter drives 600 tool calls through thirty simulated days with the brake on, then a second short run with it off.
Flagged as a duplicate. The customer rejected it and no money moved.
It broke both the limit and the payee list.
The bank reconciliation caught it and the premium was corrected.
Two log entries proved it, and the claims code advanced $5,250 without a person.
Verification failed at that exact entry.
A stress test then went after the software. It found three request shapes that reached the tool with no log entry and a claim path that paid on an unsigned log. All four are fixed and covered by tests. The live desk runs the same library in your browser, and its verify view checks a log the command-line meter signed.
A year of metering comes before the first policy
A rate that could be wrong a hundredfold argues for counting first.
The design sells the meter alone for a year and insures nothing, so that a loss table exists before a carrier is asked to trust a price.
Meter only
Brake and recovery service at design partners. The customer carries its losses, as today.
Insurance
Cover issued on a surplus lines carrier's paper, with reinsurers behind it and Breslau holding a small share.
A pool the customers own
A reciprocal exchange owned by the insured companies and managed by Breslau for a fee.
The meter writes the table of agent failures that is missing today.
In 1693 Edmond Halley took five years of birth and death registers from the city of Breslau and produced the first usable life table. Annuities could be priced properly from then on.
| Age | Persons |
|---|
In 1835 Zachariah Allen fitted his Rhode Island mill against fire and asked his insurer for a lower rate. The insurer refused, so Allen formed a mutual with other owners who had made the same improvements. Breslau's third stage follows his model.
Nine agents and five accountable employees
Agents do all the routine work in the design, each inside a written limit.
US insurance law requires accountable people. The design starts with four and adds a licensed producer before the first policy. A contracted licensed adjuster decides every claim the Adjuster agent would refuse, since its code has no deny outcome.
Each agent has a written charter. Only the Adjuster's limit is enforced in code today, and none of the charters has run.