How the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund that opposed Elon Musk's $1 trillion pay package uses Anthropic's AI tool

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, which previously opposed Elon Musk’s $1 trillion pay package, has begun using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to make its investment decisions. The world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund has confirmed that it uses AI tools from Anthropic to assess investments for potential reputational and ethical risks. The $2 trillion oil fund, managed by Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), said it is using the technology to support governance and sustainability analysis across its global portfolio.In November 2025, NBIM opposed Tesla’s decision to offer its CEO, Elon Musk, a $1 trillion pay package. Being one of the major shareholders in Tesla, the sovereign wealth fund said, “While we appreciate the significant value created under Musk’s visionary role, we are concerned about the total size of the award, dilution, and lack of mitigation of key person risk- consistent with our views on executive compensation.” The fund, established in the 1990s to invest revenue from Norway’s oil and gas industry, holds stakes in more than 7,200 companies across 60 countries and owns roughly 1.5% of publicly listed companies worldwide. In its latest responsible investment report, NBIM said AI enables broader data analysis and helps with the “faster identification of material risks,” allowing portfolio managers to better evaluate environmental, social and governance considerations.In a statement to CNBC, a spokesperson for NBIM said the fund’s ESG risk monitoring team began using Anthropic’s Claude AI model in daily operations in November 2024. The organisation added that it has since become “an important tool in our monitoring of ESG risk across the portfolio.” NBIM said in its latest report that large language models were deployed in 2025 to screen companies on the first day they enter its equity portfolio. “These tools help us rapidly scan a wide range of public information that goes beyond what data vendors typically cover. Where risks emerge around key themes, the LLM conducts deeper searches, providing contextual summaries,” the report noted. The fund receives daily AI-generated risk assessments covering recent investments. “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 labour, corruption or fraud. 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 noted. NBIM also added that AI analysis has been particularly useful when assessing smaller firms in emerging markets, where coverage may be limited or available only in local languages. NBIM CEO Nicolai Tangen said, “Artificial intelligence is changing how we work as an investor,” adding that sustainability and governance “are inseparable from financial performance,” while noting that “the world will remain complex and uncertain,” the CNBC report mentioned.The fund is currently valued at about $2.2 trillion and reported a profit of 2.36 trillion kroner ($246.9 billion) in 2025. Around 40% of its investments are in US equities, including holdings in Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft, alongside investments in fixed income, real estate and renewable energy infrastructure.Last year, some of NBIM’s ethics-related investment decisions drew criticism. In September 2025, the US State Department said it was “very troubled” by the organisation’s decision to exit investments in Caterpillar and five Israeli banks over what the fund described as “unacceptable risk” linked to rights violations in Palestinian territories. A spokesperson said the Caterpillar decision “appears to be based on illegitimate claims against Caterpillar and the Israeli government.” Norway’s finance minister, Jens Stoltenberg, responded that the divestment was “not a political decision.”Until November 2025, Norges Bank’s Executive Board decided whether companies should be excluded or placed under observation, based on recommendations from the Council on Ethics appointed by Norway’s Ministry of Finance. Following controversy over certain divestments, temporary guidelines were introduced. Under these rules, Norges Bank can no longer make new exclusion or observation decisions, though it may reverse earlier ones, while the Council on Ethics has temporarily lost the authority to recommend exclusions pending a broader review.“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. 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 continued.