NIST has released an outline for a proposed “zero draft” on testing, evaluation, verification, and validation (TEVV) for AI.
Feedback on the outline is welcome. Input received by September 12, 2025 will be considered for NIST’s initial public draft of the text; input received later will be considered for incorporation into subsequent iterations of the text. Input can be shared by email to ai-standards [at] nist.gov (ai-standards[at]nist[dot]gov). See page one of the outline for additional instructions.
Submissions, including attachments, will become part of the public record. Significant contributions may be acknowledged in NIST’s final product.
NIST’s new AI Standards Zero Drafts project will pilot a process to broaden participation in and accelerate the creation of standards, helping standards meet the AI community’s needs and unleash AI innovation.
In this project, NIST will collect input on topics with a science-backed body of work and use it to develop “zero drafts”—preliminary, stakeholder-driven drafts of standards that are as thorough as possible. These drafts then will be submitted into the private sector-led standardization process as proposals for further development into voluntary consensus standards.
Voluntary consensus standards are typically produced by SDOs through rigorous, sometimes lengthy consensus-building processes among interested experts. As NIST has gathered input on standardization needs for AI, stakeholders have repeatedly emphasized two problems, which are especially challenging to address simultaneously:
NIST seeks to expand participation in AI standards development and help standards developing organizations (SDOs) achieve consensus more quickly by releasing thorough, stakeholder-driven proposals for new SDO projects. To achieve this, NIST is collecting inputs from stakeholders and crafting them into detailed drafts meant to accompany new project proposals, following the process below:
Zero drafts will be thorough, high-quality documents reflecting stakeholder inputs, but they will ultimately be NIST proposals. And, assuming they are taken up by SDOs, they will likely still change during the formal standardization process.
The first two zero drafts are being approached as pilots. Their topics are:
NIST selected these topics from a larger list of potential topics and scopes based on stakeholder input. The full list was drawn from stakeholder-identified priorities expressed to NIST, adjusted to minimize overlap with existing standards projects. Other topics and potential scopes on that list, which may be revisited if the Zero Drafts project is extended past the pilot, were:
Maps of concepts and terminology regarding AI system designs, architectures, processes, and actors
Potential Scopes:
Technical measures for reducing risks posed by synthetic content
Potential Scopes:
NIST welcomes input throughout the process about:
Please send any suggestions via email to ai-standards [at] nist.gov (ai-standards[at]nist[dot]gov). Suggestions sent to this address will be shared publicly.
NIST also welcomes organizations’ volunteering to host listening sessions. Such sessions would be valuable at any stage of the process. Those interested in holding listening sessions can email ai_standards [at] nist.gov (ai-standards[at]nist[dot]gov).