By Hamza Faisal
Tokio Marine Holdings will begin selling insurance for artificial intelligence-powered robots starting next month, becoming the first nonlife insurer in Japan to offer such cover. The Nikkei reported on October 25 that the policies are aimed at factories and other industrial users deploying machines that perceive their surroundings and act on their own.
The move is a small product launch with a large signal attached: insurers, the businesses paid to price risk, are starting to treat autonomous machines as a normal part of industrial life rather than an experiment. Premiums will run about 20% higher than comparable traditional industrial policies, reflecting the uncertainty of pricing machines that make their own decisions.
Why robots need their own policies
Physical AI robots differ from conventional factory equipment in one important way: they use cameras and sensors to assess situations independently and choose how to respond, rather than simply repeating a programmed motion. That autonomy creates new kinds of failure — a robot misreading a scene, or reacting to something its training never covered — that standard industrial policies were not written to handle.
Tokio Marine has not yet published the full coverage terms, which it says will be revealed when the product launches in November. What is clear is the direction of travel: as robots move from caged assembly lines into shared spaces with people, the question of who pays when an autonomous machine causes damage becomes a commercial question, not just a legal one.
A market insurers expect to pass $80 billion
The timing follows the money. The global market for physical AI — robots and machines powered by AI models — is expected to exceed $80 billion within a decade, according to the Nikkei's report. Factories, warehouses and logistics operations are the early adopters, and Japan, with its ageing workforce and deep robotics industry, is a natural first market for dedicated cover.
Tokio Marine's bet is that early movers in robot insurance will learn to price autonomous-machine risk faster than rivals. Premium data from real deployments — what breaks, how often, and why — is itself a competitive asset in a market where almost nobody has loss history yet.
An industry split on AI risk
The launch also cuts against the grain elsewhere in insurance. A 2026 analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, reported by AI Rising Trends, found more than 60 property and casualty insurance groups had filed to exclude AI-related damages from corporate policies, with state regulators approving more than 80% of those requests.
Tokio Marine is taking the opposite approach: instead of carving AI out, it is building a product around it. If the policies sell, other insurers will face a choice between excluding a growing risk and learning to price it. For robot makers and their customers, that choice matters — insurance is often what stands between a promising deployment and a board-approved one.
By Hamza Faisal
