Are AI Risks Priced in the U.S. Stock Market? Evidence from Financial News Factors

Abstract

This paper asks whether firms' exposures to news about different types of AI risk are priced in U.S. stock returns. Using AI and risk keywords, I identify 7,787 Wall Street Journal articles from January 2016 to December 2025. I combine latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) with the Domain Taxonomy in the MIT AI Risk Repository to construct four news-based systematic risk factors. I estimate betas to factor innovations and test pricing with univariate portfolio analysis and Fama-MacBeth regressions. Only the taxonomy-mapped Misinformation factor (D3) is robustly priced. Its high-minus-low beta portfolio earns monthly alphas of 0.49%-0.57%, and the estimated D3 price of risk is positive and statistically significant across beta-estimation windows, conventional factor and industry controls, alternative innovation models, and the pre-ChatGPT subsample. The other factors are not reliably priced, indicating that AI-risk pricing is domain-specific.