A day after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit his job over concerns that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade, I met with founders and brothers-in-law Rune Kvist and Rajiv Dattani. They think they have a solution that could save us all, or at least help prevent AI agents from going rogue inside enterprises. 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. The pair launched a startup called Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company (AIUC) that hopes to bring AI safety to enterprises and 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 along with Emergence, Terrain, and Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann, among others, bringing its total funding to $55 million. What caught the attention of this A-list group of investors 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. To build the standard, AIUC assembled a consortium of about 250 security and risk leaders — the buyers of agents. 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 then runs an agent through a suite of some 5,000 tests to see how it behaves in scenarios involving jailbreaks, hallucinations, and data leaks. The results produce a roughly 100-page report detailing where an agent performs safely and reliably — and where it doesn’t.
Interestingly, AIUC uses AI agents to run the tests and AI to analyze the data. Humans, however, verify the final audit, Kvist said. If this sounds a bit familiar, it is.
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