Artificial intelligence

NIST’s AI efforts are focused on driving research and development, testing and evaluation, development of guidelines and standards, and implementation and application of best practices. With improved understanding of how AI technologies function, companies can trust, adopt and export American AI.

• NIST is investing in research and development that advances the science of AI to drive consistency in the measurement of AI system performance, reliability, and security. NIST research of AI technology spans across scientific machine learning models to characterizing performance of language models and agentic AI.
• NIST works in partnership with industry to advance the delivery of AI-based technology solutions to U.S. industry in high-impact applications.
• NIST is building out an AI testing and evaluation ecosystem, ensuring the U.S. government is at the forefront of evaluating frontier models and promoting American AI innovation. Improved testing and evaluation approaches and benchmarks are crucial for empowering companies to verify and validate AI systems.
• NIST produces voluntary guidelines, tools and other resources to help organizations with the development and deployment of trustworthy and responsible AI technologies.
• NIST supports the development of international technical standards that are voluntary and market-driven.

NIST does this work through the laboratory programs and the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) and through innovative partnerships, such as the AI Economic Security Center for U.S. Manufacturing Productivity and the AI Economic Security Center to Secure U.S. Critical Infrastructure from Cyberthreats.

Using AI in Scientific Research and Manufacturing

NIST researchers use AI to conduct experiments autonomously, generate datasets, and glean new information from historical data. Integrating AI tools, guidelines and frameworks into measurement science and measurement services is critical for advancing the adoption of AI systems in domain-specific environments, especially in critical and emerging technologies (CETs) and manufacturing.

NIST efforts include the development of standardized and state-of-the-art, often first-of-their-kind, methods, data, models and tools, and to enable their incorporation into broader development workflows, manufacturing and production. Our goal is to empower industry experts to make faster, more reliable predictions of biological, chemical and materials properties, for example through the development of autonomous R&D laboratories. These labs can be used to quickly deliver targeted materials and generate the vast amount of high-quality data needed to create models of processes and properties that are expected to displace slower, more traditional physics/chemistry models that are currently the standard best practice.