AI and New Medical Treatments Drive Up Auto Injury Claims

When an accident occurs, it can damage the vehicles involved and, perhaps, injure the drivers and their passengers. New research shows those injuries are now more expensive than ever.

According to CCC Intelligent Solutions, 2025 marked the first time insurers paid more to cover bodily injury (BI) claims than to cover vehicle damage. Bodily injury claims accounted for 52% of category payouts, up from 44% in 2022.

This jump comes despite injury claims happening only about a quarter as often as vehicle damage claims.

The average payout for a personal auto bodily injury claim has risen more than 30% in the last four years and now tops $30,000, according to CCC.

Multiple factors are driving these higher costs. CCC says medical inflation, shifts in treatment patterns, greater attorney involvement, social inflation, more uninsured motorists, and, most recently, artificial intelligence are driving them.

As claims costs rise, can premium increases be far behind?

Rising medical costs and increasingly expensive bodily injury claims could raise car insurance costs for everyone, even drivers who never cause an accident. Insurers factor claim costs into the premiums they charge, so new medical treatments and the growing use of artificial intelligence in personal injury cases could eventually show up in consumers’ insurance bills.

Medical expenses submitted with third-party auto injury claims rose from about $24,300 per injured person in early 2023 to $32,300 in the first quarter of 2026 — a 33% increase in just three years, according to CCC.

These higher costs aren’t because patients are having more procedures or staying in treatment longer. Instead, CCC reports, the types of treatments being used are changing.

Traditional surgeries like spinal fusions and discectomies, the removal of all or part of a damaged spinal disc, are still costly parts of injury claims. But insurers are also seeing increased use of treatments such as platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections and extracorporeal shockwave therapy. 

PRP treatments average $11,000 to $12,000 per injured person, according to CCC, while patients receiving shockwave therapy undergo an average of eight to nine sessions. Although CCC didn’t specify the cost of those sessions, repeated treatments can substantially increase the medical expenses associated with an injury claim.

Patients are also getting newer procedures sooner in their treatment journeys. CCC found that patients now turn to experimental treatments an average of 122 days after an accident, compared with 166 days three years ago.

Possible explanations include greater treatment availability, a shift toward earlier medical intervention, and financial or legal incentives to accelerate treatment. The report doesn’t establish which factors are responsible or whether earlier treatment produces better medical outcomes. But the trend raises questions about whether changing treatment practices are driving higher insurance claims without a corresponding increase in injury severity.

And then there’s AI

CCC notes that submitted medical expenses rose sharply soon after generative AI tools became widely available in late 2022.

This doesn’t prove that ChatGPT or other AI systems are causing higher insurance claims. Instead, CCC says AI may be a force multiplier for trends already in motion.

In other words, AI didn’t create medical inflation, expensive treatments, or larger jury verdicts. But it can make it much easier for personal injury attorneys to build and pursue claims.

Law firms can use generative AI to review and summarize medical records, create treatment timelines, extract diagnoses and billing information, find missing documentation, and help draft settlement demands.

As a result, attorneys handle more cases, prepare claims faster, and present insurers with more detailed demands.

The technology is spreading quickly through the legal profession. Forty-one percent of law firms surveyed by Thomson Reuters in 2026 reported using generative AI, up from 28% a year earlier, according to CCC.

“There’s the argument that the outcomes are driving that, so maybe going to low-complexity surgery versus the more traditional methods yields a higher settlement or a higher probability of a policy limit settlement,” the CCC report’s author, Erik Bahnsen, told Claims Journal. “You could say they could be letting the data lead to what ultimately yields a better outcome.”

Related articles