Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, addresses a press conference on his company's annual results for 2024 at Norges Bank in Oslo, Norway, on January 29, 2025.
Norway's $2 trillion oil fund, one of the world's biggest investors, said Thursday that it is now using AI to screen investments for potential reputational and ethical risks.
Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) manages the fund, which was set up in the 1990s to invest revenues from Norway's oil and gas industry. It's an investor in more than 7,200 companies across 60 countries and has stakes in around 1.5% of the world's publicly listed stocks.
It's long been influential on the global market and ESG — Environmental, Social, and Governance — investing. It uses its influence and voting rights to set expectations for the companies and markets it invests in, including impact on people, the environment and society.
In its annual responsible investment report, the fund's management team said it was now using AI to provide governance and sustainability insights to portfolio managers.
The technology means it can expand the scope and scale of the information it analyzes, leading to "faster identification of material risks," NBIM said.
A spokesperson for NBIM told CNBC that the organization's ESG risk monitoring team first began using Anthropic's Claude AI model in day-to-day work in Nov. 2024. Since then, they said, it has become "an important tool in our monitoring of ESG risk across the portfolio."
In Thursday's report, NBIM said 2025 saw the deployment of large-language AI models to screen all companies on their first day of entering its equity portfolio.
"These tools help us rapidly scan a wide range of public information that goes beyond what data vendors typically cover," the report said. "Where risks emerge around key themes, the LLM conducts deeper searches, providing contextual summaries."