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.
Ole Berg-rusten | Afp | Getty Images
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.”
NBIM receives daily AI-generated risk assessments for investments made the previous day, which the fund manager said enabled its team to immediately consider ways to mitigate these.
“Within 24 hours of our investment, the AI tools flag new companies in the fund’s equity portfolio with potential links to, for example, forced labor, corruption or fraud,” NBIM said in Thursday’s report.
“Often, this information has not been captured in international media coverage or data vendor alerts. We always review the information before we make an investment or risk decision. In multiple instances, we identified and sold these investments before the broader market reacted to the risks, avoiding potential losses.”
NBIM said using AI this way had been particularly valuable for researching smaller companies in emerging markets, where news about the firm may be limited to small media outlets in local languages.
“Artificial intelligence is changing how we work as an investor,” NBIM CEO Nicolai Tangen said in a statement in the report adding that sustainability and governance “are inseparable from financial performance,” noting that “the world will remain complex and uncertain.”
The fund’s value stands at around $2.2 trillion. In 2025, it posted an annual profit of 2.36 trillion kronor, or $246.9 billion.
Nearly 40% of NBIM’s investments are in U.S. 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 also invests in fixed income, real estate and renewable energy infrastructure.
Last year, however, some of its ethics-related decisions drew criticism — notably from the White House.
In September, the U.S. State Department told CNBC it was “very troubled” by NBIM’s decision to exit positions in American machinery manufacturer Caterpillar and five Israeli banks, citing “unacceptable risk” that the companies were contributing to rights violations in Palestinian territories.
A spokesperson said NBIM’s Caterpillar exit “appears to be based on illegitimate claims against Caterpillar and the Israeli government.”
Norway’s finance minister, Jens Stoltenberg, responded by saying the divestment was “not a political decision.”
Until Nov. 2025, the Executive Board of Norges Bank decided whether companies should be excluded from the fund’s investment portfolio or placed on an observation list. These decisions were informed by the Council on Ethics, an independent body appointed by Norway’s Ministry of Finance.
But following the controversy over some of its divestments 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 make decisions on observation or exclusion of a company from the fund – but it may revoke previous decisions on excluding a company or putting it on the observation list. Meanwhile, the Council on Ethics was stripped of its ability to recommend observation or exclusion at least until the ethical framework review is finalized.
“The conflict in Gaza and the discussions about the fund’s ethical framework and investments in Israel demonstrated in 2025 how complex and challenging this can be in practice,” Tangen said in Thursday’s report.
“While the fund’s ethical framework is under revision, we continue our responsible investment work, strengthening the link between ownership and investment decisions and focusing on what is financially material.”
