Cyberrisk and AI Firms

Kumar Rishabh; Roxana Mihet; Julian Jang-Jaccard

doi:10.1093/rcfs/cfag018

Cyberrisk and AI Firms

Kumar Rishabh¹; Roxana Mihet²; Julian Jang-Jaccard³

¹ University of Lausanne and University of Basel , · ² Swiss Finance Institute, University of Lausanne, and CEPR , · ³ Cyber-Defence Campus, ArmaSuisse , Lausanne,

The Review of Corporate Finance Studies 2026 open access

Abstract Does AI make firms vulnerable or resilient to cyberrisk? We develop a firm-year measure of AI intensity for U.S. listed firms using patents and 10-K business descriptions. A 1-standard-deviation increase in cyberrisk reduces patenting by 25%–30% for non-AI firms, with larger declines in data-intensive technologies. Frontier AI firms are much less affected, and their valuations rise when cyberrisk is high. This resilience does not extend to firms that adopt external AI tools without internal AI innovation. The evidence fits two channels: cyberrisk raises the cost of data-intensive innovation, and internal AI development builds organizational capacity to sustain innovation under cyberrisk.

DOI: 10.1093/rcfs/cfag018
Language: en
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