AI misuse now ranks as the top reputational threat to brands

Misuse of artificial intelligence now ranks as the single biggest threat to corporate reputations — ahead of accusations of harming children and the fallout from the US-Israel war on Iran — according to a new survey of more than 150 public affairs leaders.

The finding appears in the latest edition of the quarterly Reputation Risk Index, released on Tuesday. The index tracks which risks public affairs professionals believe pose the greatest danger to brand standing, and AI misuse has now moved to the top of that list.

The scale of the survey matters for interpreting the result. More than 150 public affairs leaders — the executives responsible for managing how companies communicate through crises — contributed to the assessment. Their consensus places AI misuse above a set of risks that most companies would previously have treated as career-ending reputational events, including being accused of exposing children to mental, emotional or physical harm.

What does the ranking actually say?

The Reputation Risk Index measures perceived reputational threat, not confirmed incidents. In this edition, the ordering of concerns is the story:

• AI misuse — the top-ranked reputational threat
• Accusations of putting children in the way of mental, emotional or physical harm — ranked below AI misuse
• Issues exposed by the US-Israel war on Iran — also ranked below AI misuse

That ordering is notable because it inverts traditional assumptions about reputational risk. Child-safety accusations have historically sat near the top of any corporate risk register, alongside governance failures and safety scandals. A technology-related risk now outranking them signals how quickly AI has moved from an operational tool to a primary source of corporate vulnerability.

The term "misuse" in the survey context is broad. It covers the ways companies themselves deploy AI — in customer interactions, automated decision-making, content generation and data handling — as well as the reputational damage that follows when those deployments go wrong. The index does not distinguish between internal misuse and external abuse of company AI systems in the portion of the findings reported.

Why does this matter now?

The survey results land amid a parallel escalation in warnings from leading technology figures about AI's destructive potential. Those warnings, the survey's release notes, concern AI in the wrong hands precipitating existential threats on a mass scale — specifically nuclear war or destruction by bioweaponry.

The gap between those two levels of concern is the story's central tension. Tech leaders are framing worst-case AI scenarios in civilizational terms. Meanwhile, the people who manage corporate reputations are already treating AI misuse as a present-tense, top-of-list business risk — not a hypothetical future one.

For communications and public affairs teams, the practical implication is direct. AI-related incidents — a chatbot that misbehaves, an automated system that makes biased decisions, a generative tool that produces damaging content — now carry the same reputational weight as scandals that once defined the category of corporate crisis.

Who produced the index?

The Reputation Risk Index is a quarterly publication. This edition surveyed more than 150 public affairs leaders and was released on Tuesday. The survey population — senior professionals responsible for corporate positioning and crisis response — makes the ranking a useful signal of how the communications function itself is prioritizing AI risk, separate from how technologists or policymakers frame it.

What comes next?

The index will continue to publish quarterly, which means the AI-misuse ranking can now be tracked over time. If it holds the top position in future editions, it would confirm a structural shift in how companies weigh technology risk against traditional reputational hazards. If it slips, that would suggest the current ranking reflects a moment of heightened attention rather than a durable change in corporate risk priorities.

Either way, the message from this edition is clear: the executives who manage brand risk have already decided that AI is their biggest problem.