Adobe (ADBE) Risk Analysis

Social, ethical and operational issues relating to the use of AI, including generative AI and agentic AI, in our offerings may result in reputational harm, liability and additional costs. We are increasingly incorporating AI technologies, developed by us and by third parties, into many of our offerings. If our AI development, deployment, content labeling or governance is ineffective or inadequate, it may result in incidents that impair the public acceptance of AI solutions or cause harm to individuals, customers or society, or result in our offerings not working as intended or producing unexpected outcomes. Jurisdictions around the world are developing and passing new regulations that apply specifically to the use of AI. For example, the EU AI Act was adopted in 2024 and will be implemented in phases through 2030, and other jurisdictions are considering similarly focused legislation. These regulations and the evolving AI regulatory environment may, among other impacts, result in inconsistencies among AI regulations and frameworks across jurisdictions, increase our compliance, governance and research and development costs, increase our exposure to claims related to our AI models and increase liability related to the use of AI by our customers or users that are beyond our control. While we have taken a responsible approach to the development and use of AI, such as in our Adobe Firefly offerings, there can be no guarantee that future AI regulations will not adversely impact us or conflict with our approach to AI, including affecting our ability to make our AI offerings available without costly changes, delaying or halting development of AI offerings, requiring us to change our AI development practices, monetization strategies and/or indemnity protections and subjecting us to additional compliance requirements, regulatory action, competitive harm, reputational harm and/or legal liability. To the extent we rely on third-party AI models in our products, services and solutions, we will face risks inherent in how those models have been developed and deployed, including situations in which the third party may lack a proper license or consent for the training data used for their model. In addition, new competition regulations on AI development and deployment could impose new requirements on our markets that could impact our business and financial results. Uncertainty around new and evolving AI uses may require significant, additional investment to develop models and proprietary datasets, responsible-use frameworks and new approaches and processes to attribute or compensate content creators. We have experienced, and may in the future experience, challenges accessing AI models, datasets or hardware. Developing, testing and deploying AI systems may also increase the cost of our offerings, including due to the nature of the computing costs involved in such systems. These costs could adversely impact our margins as we continue to make significant investments in AI development, add AI capabilities to our offerings and scale our AI offerings without assurance that our customers and users will adopt them. Further, as with any new offerings based on new technologies, consumer reception and monetization pathways are uncertain, our strategies may not be successful and our business and financial results could be adversely impacted. New AI offerings and technologies could modify workforce needs, result in negative publicity about AI and decrease demand for our existing products, services and solutions, all of which could adversely impact our business.