NIST publishes the AI Risk Management Framework
A voluntary standard built around four functions — govern, map, measure, manage — that later became a reference point for federal procurement and state AI bills.
- Government & policy
- Notable
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology published version 1.0 of its AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF), a voluntary document intended to help organisations “incorporate trustworthiness considerations into the design, development, use, and evaluation of AI products, services, and systems.” It was developed over roughly eighteen months through public workshops and comment periods involving industry, academia and civil-society groups, and carried no legal force of its own.
The framework organises risk management into four functions — govern, map, measure and manage — rather than prescribing specific technical tests or thresholds. “Govern” covers organisational culture and accountability structures; “map” asks organisations to identify context and potential harms before deployment; “measure” covers assessment and testing; “manage” covers prioritising and acting on identified risks. NIST paired the framework with a companion Playbook offering more concrete implementation suggestions, deliberately leaving the core document sector- and technology-neutral so it could apply to a system as simple as a spam filter or as complex as a frontier language model.
Because it was voluntary and abstract, the AI RMF drew little immediate controversy compared with contemporaneous EU and Chinese rulemaking, and it was not, at publication, tied to any procurement requirement or enforcement mechanism. Its significance became clearer in retrospect: the framework’s vocabulary and four-function structure were subsequently referenced in the Biden administration’s October 2023 executive order on AI, adopted piecemeal by federal agencies for procurement guidance, and cited by several state legislatures drafting their own AI bills. It gave US AI policy a shared technical vocabulary before it had shared law — a “soft” instrument that outlasted the harder measures debated around it.