Insurance companies sell a peculiar product: a promise meant to become useful on somebody’s worst Tuesday. A factory catches fire. A cargo ship loses a container. Hackers freeze a hospital network. A director is sued. A storm turns a roof into confetti. The policy is paper until the moment it becomes money, expertise and a phone call returned quickly. AIG has spent more than a century arranging those promises at industrial scale.
The letters once stood for a financial empire whose reach extended well beyond property and casualty insurance. They also carry the scar tissue of 2008, when the U.S. government intervened to prevent AIG’s collapse. The company that emerged is materially different. It repaid the government by 2012, separated most of its life and retirement operation as Corebridge Financial in 2022, sold other businesses and reduced the kinds of exposures that made results difficult to predict.
What remains is easier to describe, though hardly simple: a global general insurer built around North America Commercial, International Commercial and Global Personal. In 2025 those businesses wrote $23.7 billion in net premiums. They insure the physical machinery of commerce, the decisions made in boardrooms and the possessions of individuals. They also manage the work after a loss, when a contract meets real life.
01 / The ResetA smaller giant
AIG began far from New York finance. In 1919, Cornelius Vander Starr opened American Asiatic Underwriters in a two-room Shanghai office. The business crossed borders early: New York in 1926, Cuba in 1937, then Japan and Germany after World War II. Its main office moved from Shanghai to New York in 1939. That international history is more than an origin story. It trained the company to see insurance as coordination across laws, currencies, languages and local markets.
Scale later became both strength and danger. By the financial crisis, AIG was a complicated group with exposures that reached far outside conventional insurance. The rescue remains part of its public identity, but it is not a useful map of today’s portfolio. The recent strategy has been subtraction: leave businesses that dilute the core, simplify the parent, modernize systems and demand that underwriters charge adequately for the risks they accept.
“We are not chasing features. We are building infrastructure.”AIG on its AI strategy
The result shows up in an insurance metric that sounds designed to repel civilians. The combined ratio compares claims and expenses with earned premiums. Above 100%, the insurer loses money on underwriting before investment returns. Below 100%, it makes an underwriting profit. AIG finished 2025 at 90.1%, and underwriting income reached $2.3 billion - the first annual result above $2 billion since 2008. That was its fifth consecutive year of underwriting profitability.
For every $1.00 of earned premium, roughly 90 cents went to claims and underwriting expenses. The remaining slice was underwriting profit.
02 / The CatalogA map of modern anxiety
Commercial property and casualty coverage is the center of gravity. AIG protects buildings, inventory and equipment; covers legal liabilities involving workers, customers and professional decisions; and writes financial lines such as directors and officers insurance. Its specialty teams handle aviation, marine cargo, trade credit, political risk, energy and other exposures that do not fit neatly into a small-business policy.
Commercial property, cargo, aircraft, construction projects, fine art, homes and vehicles.
Directors and officers, professional liability, mergers and acquisitions, employment practices.
Cyber incidents, business interruption, political violence, product recalls and supply shocks.
Workers’ compensation, accident and health, business travel and personal accident coverage.
For individuals, the current portfolio is selective rather than mass-market everywhere. It includes accident and health products, auto and homeowners coverage in certain countries, warranty and device protection, and insurance for high-net-worth households through Private Client Select in the United States. AIG sold its global individual travel insurance and assistance business in 2024, another sign that the company now treats portfolio shape as a strategic choice.
The service around a policy matters as much as the wording. Risk engineers can inspect facilities and recommend ways to reduce losses. Claims specialists interpret coverage, organize experts and pay valid claims. Digital portals let risk managers and brokers file claims, retrieve policies and study loss information across countries. AIG’s claims organization numbers more than 4,000 people in over 40 countries - an emergency-response network hiding inside a balance sheet.
03 / The EconomicsHow the promise pays
AIG earns money twice, if it does the first job correctly. It receives premiums for accepting risk, then pays claims and the expenses of acquiring and servicing policies. The gap is underwriting profit. Because premiums arrive before many claims are settled, AIG invests the pool of assets held against future obligations. In 2025, it generated $4.2 billion of net investment income alongside its $2.3 billion underwriting result.
Distribution is an ecosystem. Brokers and independent agents bring clients, help structure programs and receive commissions. Reinsurers take portions of selected exposures. Capital-market partners can support additional capacity. AIG’s job is to decide which risks to accept, on what terms, at what price and with how much capital behind them. Cheap growth can be expensive years later, which is why disciplined underwriting is repeated so often in insurer presentations that it begins to sound like a meditation mantra.
Customers span individuals, small and midsize companies, public bodies and multinational corporations, including Fortune 500 businesses. The larger and stranger the exposure, the more AIG’s network can matter. A manufacturer with plants in 18 countries cannot solve insurance by photocopying a U.S. policy. It may need locally admitted coverage, a master policy, consistent limits, tax and regulatory compliance, claims coordination and one reliable view of the whole program.
04 / The EdgeGlobal plumbing, specialist judgment
AIG competes with Chubb, Zurich, Allianz, AXA XL, Travelers, Liberty Mutual, Arch and the specialty market at Lloyd’s, among others. Price matters, but it is not the whole contest. Buyers and brokers also compare policy language, appetite, available limits, financial-strength ratings, claims reputation, engineering knowledge and the willingness to solve a problem that does not resemble last year’s template.
AIG’s differentiation is strongest where complexity compounds: a large limit, an unusual asset, a volatile industry or a footprint across many countries. It can assemble specialist underwriters, local licenses, claims teams and balance-sheet capacity around one client. That does not make it the automatic choice. Insurance is negotiated, competitors have deep expertise, and a disciplined carrier will sometimes decline the very risk a customer wants it to take. The advantage is breadth with a point of view, not breadth without limits.
The company has also found growth through carefully chosen partnerships. It formed Syndicate 2479 with Amwins and Blackstone to provide specialty portfolio capacity. It acquired renewal rights for most of Everest’s retail commercial portfolios in several markets. In early 2026, AIG completed investments in specialty insurer Convex and its majority owner, Onex, paired with a quota-share arrangement that lets AIG participate in Convex’s underwriting results without buying the whole company.
05 / The Machine LearnsAI for the paperwork between judgments
Insurance runs on unstructured information: broker submissions, schedules, inspection reports, emails, policy forms, photographs and claims notices. Skilled underwriters can spend an indecent amount of time finding facts before they can exercise judgment. AIG’s AI program attacks that queue. Partnerships with Palantir, Anthropic, AWS and Google support tools that ingest documents, organize data and place relevant information in front of underwriters and claims professionals.
The most revealing idea is an “ontology,” which the company describes as a digital twin of its business. In plain language, it gives shared names and relationships to accounts, policies, limits, hazards, claims, documents and workflows. Once the organization agrees on what its information means, software can retrieve and compare it with less improvisation. Underwriting by AIG Assist is being scaled to help with submissions and portfolio analysis; Claims by AIG Assist is designed to shorten steps such as moving from a notice of loss to a coverage letter.
The useful boundary is human accountability. Insurance decisions can alter whether a business rebuilds, a victim is compensated or a claim becomes a lawsuit. Faster extraction is valuable. An unexplained decision is not. AIG says its approach emphasizes auditability, regulatory clarity and human oversight. The ambition is not to remove the specialist from the loop. It is to give the specialist a cleaner desk.
The ambition is not to remove the specialist from the loop. It is to give the specialist a cleaner desk.
06 / The Next ChapterA century old, newly focused
AIG entered mid-2026 with a leadership transition. Eric Andersen, a longtime Aon executive, became chief executive on June 1; Peter Zaffino moved to executive chairman after leading the turnaround. Second-quarter figures suggested momentum: General Insurance net premiums written rose 24% as reported, the combined ratio was 87.3% and adjusted after-tax income reached $2.11 per diluted share. Those numbers will move with catastrophes, pricing and markets, but they mark where the company stands now.
Its culture has been recast around ownership, standards, teamwork, allyship and integrity, with a stated emphasis on continuous learning and AI fluency. The harder test is whether those values survive renewal pressure, claims disputes and the temptation to let a good market loosen standards. Insurance culture is revealed slowly, one accepted risk at a time.
For a buyer, AIG can be useful when the problem has edges: operations in several countries, a cyber exposure that needs incident support, specialized property, executive liability, aviation, cargo, political risk or a high-value household that strains ordinary limits. A broker or risk manager can use its portals to manage policies and claims, its engineers to reduce losses, and its global network to make local pieces behave like one program.
The company’s place in the market is therefore not simply “big insurer.” It is a risk assembler. Capital, contracts, data and human specialists are brought together so a client can do something uncertain - open a plant, ship goods, acquire a company, operate an aircraft, digitize a network - without carrying every possible consequence alone. AIG’s second act depends on doing that old job with fewer distractions and better tools.