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Global Risk Advisory Council tells leaders to act now on AI misuse, its top brand risk
Global Risk Advisory Council ranks AI misuse as the top threat to brands in a survey of more than 150 leaders and urges immediate action. The worry has recurred since April 2025. This time the council wants companies to treat it as a governance item now.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
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What happened
- The July edition ranked supply chain, political and other risks tied to the US-Israel war on Iran first, but respondents now say those anxieties have eased.
- Global Situation Room, a Washington DC public affairs firm, created both the Global Risk Advisory Council and its quarterly Reputation Risk Index.
- Council chair Isabel Casillas Guzman's message came two days after the Trump administration named intelligence director Jay Clayton as AI czar.
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Why it matters
- decision Guzman sets the productivity gains of fast AI deployment against falling public trust. Each company has to decide who weighs that trade-off before a deployment ships.
- exposure Reputational damage from AI can now arrive as litigation: respondents tie AI to lawsuits linking products to real-world harm.
- constraint The index ranks the perceptions of crisis practitioners. That can justify putting AI misuse on a board agenda, but it cannot size the exposure for any one company.
By the council's own account, the new element in this edition is the advice. It acknowledged that AI misuse is not a particularly new concern, and that it has been identified as a top worry repeatedly since the first edition in April 2025 [3]. It has not held first place throughout. The July edition put supply chain issues, divisive political stances and other factors tied to the US-Israel war on Iran at the top [13]. In her message from the chair, Guzman said the geopolitical shock "hasn't gone away, but its first, sharpest reputational blow has faded, and the conflict has slipped out of the top tier" [14]. That drop took a single quarterly edition [18].
The two rankings behave differently over time. The war risk rose and fell with events inside one quarter [18]. AI misuse has come back edition after edition since April 2025 [3]. In my view the first is a communications problem for this quarter and the second is a standing governance item. The advisory is the council's attempt to move the second onto this quarter's agenda [4].
The advisory asks business leaders to "take immediate and decisive action to mitigate potential long-term brand damage" [4]. The council's stated reason is that AI has "become a clear and present danger to public confidence for many corporations" [5]. Guzman put the trade-off in plain terms. "As AI is rapidly deployed for productivity gains, we have also seen diminishing public trust in the technology, elevating the need for businesses to take measures to protect their brands," she said [6]. "In this environment, AI use or overuse can quickly damage a company's standing with customers, investors, or other key stakeholders, making it essential for companies to deploy preventive tactics now" [7].
The index also comes from a party with an interest in urgency. Global Situation Room, a Washington DC public affairs firm, created both the council and the index [8]. A public affairs firm has a commercial interest in companies treating reputation as an immediate problem. The ranking is what more than 150 respondents reported [1]. They are former heads of state, ministers and senior executives from more than 20 countries, invited after establishing credentials in crisis response [9]. The urgency is the council's interpretation of that ranking [4].
The respondents' description is more specific than the advisory. They credited AI with "organizational efficiency" while also "accelerating safety and data concerns, hacks, fraud, straining privacy protections, upending the workforce, and dragging companies into court as lawsuits increasingly link AI products to real-world harm" [10]. Privacy shows up twice in the results. Infringing individuals' sensitive information ranked highly behind AI misuse as a risk in its own right, as did putting children at risk of harm [11]. Unethical or illegal conduct for advantage and poor strategic or operational decisions completed the top five [12].
Guzman's message came two days after the Trump administration named Jay Clayton, the director of national intelligence, as its new AI czar [15]. Clayton had told federal lawmakers that AI was a "gamechanger" but also posed "a threat" [16]. Trump said Clayton would oversee an entity coordinating "the federal government's engagement with consumers, public interest groups, religious organizations, critical infrastructure providers, and" AI tech companies [17]. A company that sets AI controls this quarter will be doing so before that entity has said what it expects of companies.
What to watch
- Whether the next quarterly edition keeps AI misuse first or lets a news-driven risk displace it, as the Iran war did in July.
- What the coordinating entity under Jay Clayton asks of AI companies and their corporate customers once its remit is set.
- Whether the council publishes the specific preventive measures behind its call for immediate action.