Norway’s wealth fund opens up investments with Anthropics Cloud

Norway’s $2 trillion oil fund, one of the world’s biggest investors, said Thursday it is now using AI to screen investments for potential reputational and moral risks.

Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) manages the fund, which was established in the 1990s to invest revenues from Norway’s oil and gas industry. It is an investor in more than 7,200 companies across 60 countries, with a stake in 1.5% of the world’s publicly listed stocks.

It has long been influential on global markets and ESG – environmental, social and governance – investing. It uses its influence and voting rights to set expectations for investing companies and markets, including the impact on people, the environment and society.

In its annual Responsible Investment report, the fund’s management team said it is now using AI to provide governance and sustainability insights to portfolio managers.

The technology means it can expand the scope and volume of data it analyzes, leading to “faster identification of material risks,” NBIM said.

A spokesperson for NBIM told CNBC that the firm’s ESG risk monitoring team first began using Anthropic’s cloud AI model in daily work in November 2024. Since then, he said, “it has become an important tool in our monitoring of ESG risk across the portfolio.”

In a report on Thursday, NBIM said it has deployed large-scale AI models to screen all companies on the first day of entry into its equity portfolio in 2025.

“These tools help us quickly scan more public information than data vendors typically cover,” the report said. “If risks emerge around key topics, LLM conducts in-depth searches, providing contextual summaries.”

NBIM receives daily AI-generated risk assessments for investments made the previous day, which the fund manager said enabled his team to immediately consider ways to mitigate these.

“Within 24 hours of our investment, AI tools flag new companies in the fund’s equity portfolio, for example, with potential links to forced labor, corruption or fraud,” NBIM said in a report on Thursday.

“Typically, this information is not captured in international media coverage or data vendor alerts. We always review the information before we make an investment or risk decision. In many cases, we identify and sell these investments before the broader market reacts to risks, avoiding potential losses.”

NBIM said using AI in this way is particularly valuable for researching smaller companies in emerging markets, where news about the organization may be limited to smaller media outlets in local languages.

“Artificial intelligence is changing how we work as investors,” NBIM CEO Nikolai Tangen said in a statement in the report, adding that while sustainability and governance are “inseparable from financial performance,” “the world remains complex and uncertain.”

The fund is worth about $2.2 trillion. In 2025, it posted an annual profit of 2.36 trillion kroner, or $246.9 billion.

About 40% of NBIM’s investments are in US equities, with its most valuable holdings including a 1.3% stake in Nvidia, a 1.2% stake in Apple and a 1.3% stake in Microsoft. NBIM invests in fixed income, real estate and renewable energy infrastructure.

Last year, however, some of its ethics-related decisions drew criticism — especially from the White House.

In September, the US State Department told CNBC it was “deeply troubled” by NBIM’s decision to exit positions in American machinery maker Caterpillar and five Israeli banks, citing the companies’ “unacceptable risk” of rights violations in the Palestinian territories.

A spokesman said NBIM’s departure from Caterpillar was “based on unjustified claims against Caterpillar and the Israeli government.”

Norway’s finance minister, Jens Stoltenberg, responded by saying the appropriation was “not a political decision”.

Until November 2025, Norges Bank’s executive board decided whether to exclude companies from the fund’s investment portfolio or place them on the watch list. The decisions were made by the Council on Ethics, an independent body appointed by Norway’s Ministry of Finance.

But after some controversy over its delivery last year, temporary guidelines were put in place, with a review on NBIM’s ethical framework due to be presented by a government-appointed committee later this year.

Under the temporary guidelines, Norges Bank can no longer take decisions to monitor or delist a company from the fund – but it can revoke previous decisions to delist or put a company on watch. Meanwhile, the Council on Ethics was stripped of its ability to recommend minimum observation or exclusion until a review of the ethical framework was finalized.

“The conflict in Gaza and the debates over the Fund’s ethical framework and investments in Israel demonstrated how complex and challenging this could be in practice in 2025,” Tangen said in Thursday’s report.

“While the fund’s ethical framework is under revision, we will continue our responsible investment work, strengthening the link between ownership and investment decisions and focusing on financial substance.”