A Simple Pitch: Insure Enterprises Against Their Own Agents
A day after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit over concerns that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade, I sat down with founders and brothers-in-law Rune Kvist and Rajiv Dattani. They believe they have a solution that could save us all β or, at minimum, stop AI agents from going rogue inside enterprises.
"AI is getting smarter at an increasingly rapid rate. The surprising thing about AI is that it becomes harder to adopt and harder to control as AI gets smarter, not easier," said Kvist, an early Anthropic employee who is also married to Dattani's sister. Dattani is the former COO of the AI safety research organization METR.
Meet AIUC
The pair have launched a startup called the Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company (AIUC) that aims to bring AI safety to enterprises and to the companies building AI models and agents. The startup names Cursor, Lovable, Harvey, and ElevenLabs as customers.
On Tuesday, AIUC announced a $40 million Series A led by Ribbit Capital, with participation from First Harmonic. It previously closed a $15 million seed round from Nat Friedman through his fund NFDG, alongside Emergence, Terrain, and Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann, among others β bringing total funding to $55 million.
SOC 2 for AI Agents
What caught the attention of this A-list investor group is AIUC's attempt to apply a familiar cybersecurity model to a new set of AI risks. The company has built a third-party audit and certification layer for AI agents.
"Banks, hospitals, governments and militaries no longer decline to deploy AI because a model isn't smart enough," Kvist said. "They decline because they've made commitments to their own customers about what a system will and won't do, and nobody can currently guarantee that."
Using the widely adopted cybersecurity standard SOC 2 as its muse, AIUC has developed a standard called AIUC-1, along with a testing service that validates agents against it.
Building the Standard With 250 Buyers
To build the standard, AIUC assembled a consortium of roughly 250 security and risk leaders β the people who actually buy agents. "These are the people who we meet with on a monthly basis, and the question we ask them is: When you're buying agents from someone, what would you look for? What are the questions you'd want to ask, and what would you want to see addressed?" Dattani told TechCrunch.
That feedback shapes the tests. The startup runs an agent through a suite of roughly 5,000 tests to see how it behaves in scenarios involving jailbreaks, hallucinations, and data leaks. The results produce an approximately 100-page report detailing where an agent performs safely and reliably β and where it doesn't.
Notably, AIUC uses AI agents to run the tests and AI to analyze the data. Humans verify the final audit, Kvist said.
The METR Connection
If this sounds familiar, it is. Dattani's former employer METR, where he served as COO from 2024 to 2025 and remains a board member, does similar testing for the frontier labs β though its work until recently focused mostly on performance, meaning whether agents can reliably complete tasks.
METR was one of the independent research organizations OpenAI used to investigate its Hugging Face incident.
Anthr...
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