Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, a significant player in global finance, has recently integrated artificial intelligence (AI) tools to enhance its investment strategies. This shift comes after the fund’s prior opposition to Elon Musk’s controversial $1 trillion compensation package for his role at Tesla. The fund’s ties to ethical investment practices are becoming increasingly evident as it utilizes Anthropic’s AI to evaluate investments for reputational and ethical considerations effectively.
The $2 trillion oil fund, overseen by Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), leverages this technology to enhance governance and sustainability evaluations within its global holdings. Historically, in November 2025, NBIM raised objections against Tesla’s pay package for Musk, highlighting a broad concern over the implications of such a massive award, dilution of governance, and key person risk.
Originating in the 1990s, the fund was created to invest proceeds from Norway’s oil and gas sectors. Today, it maintains stakes in over 7,200 companies across 60 nations, amounting to roughly 1.5% of all publicly traded entities worldwide. According to its recent responsible investment report, NBIM’s application of AI facilitates comprehensive data analysis and accelerates the identification of “material risks,” enhancing its ability to evaluate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors.
Insights from NBIM on AI in Investment Decisions
In a statement to CNBC, a NBIM spokesperson revealed that the office’s ESG risk monitoring team began utilizing Anthropic’s Claude AI model in daily functions starting November 2024. This technology has since emerged as a crucial resource for assessing ESG risks within the portfolio. The report further noted that advanced language models were applied in 2025 to evaluate companies the very day they joined the equity portfolio.
The report emphasized, “These tools help us rapidly scan a wide array of public information that exceeds the reach of traditional data vendors. When risks surface concerning key themes, the LLM conducts in-depth searches, returning contextual summaries.” Daily AI-generated risk assessments are received, covering recent investments and alerting the fund to potential links to issues like forced labor, corruption, or fraud within 24 hours of a new investment.
“Frequently, such information isn’t reported by international media or data vendor alerts. We scrutinize all findings before making any investment or risk decisions. In various instances, we have identified and divested from problematic investments before the wider market even recognized the risks, thereby avoiding potential financial losses,” NBIM stated.
Additionally, AI analysis proves especially valuable when analyzing smaller firms in emerging markets, where coverage may be sparse or available only in local languages.
Nicolai Tangen, CEO of NBIM, remarked, “Artificial intelligence is transforming the way we operate as investors,” reinforcing the notion that sustainability and governance are intrinsically linked to financial success. He cautioned, however, that “the world will remain complex and unpredictable,” as noted in the CNBC report.
Currently valued at approximately $2.2 trillion, the fund reported a profit of 2.36 trillion kroner (approximately $246.9 billion) in 2025. Around 40% of its portfolio is concentrated in US equities, including major investments in Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft, in addition to allocations in fixed income, real estate, and renewable energy infrastructure.
In the previous year, some of NBIM’s ethical investment choices garnered criticism. In September 2025, the US State Department expressed being “very troubled” by the fund’s decision to exit investments in Caterpillar and several Israeli banks due to what NBIM described as “unacceptable risk” related to rights violations in the Palestinian territories.
A spokesperson asserted that the decision related to Caterpillar “seems to be based on unfounded claims against Caterpillar and the Israeli government.” Norway’s finance minister, Jens Stoltenberg, defended the divestment, asserting it was “not a political decision.”
Before November 2025, Norges Bank’s Executive Board was responsible for determining the exclusion or observation of companies based on recommendations from the Council on Ethics, appointed by the Ministry of Finance.
In response to the criticism arising from certain divestments, temporary guidelines were introduced restricting Norges Bank from making new exclusion or observation decisions, although it retains the ability to reverse previous ones. The Council on Ethics has also temporarily lost its authority to recommend exclusions while a broader review is underway.
“The conflict in Gaza and discussions about the fund’s ethical framework and investments in Israel demonstrated in 2025 how complex and challenging this can be in practice. 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,” Tangen concluded.
