AI and autonomous systems risk: standards that apply
The 5 standards listed for AI and autonomous systems risk in the registry, each with its status, UNI (Unique Nexus Identifier) and the rules stated in its text.
- Nexus Standards: NS-0, NS-10, NS-11, NS-12.
- Open standards: AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0); OECD AI Principles; Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (Artificial Intelligence Act); PROV-O: The PROV Ontology; Verifiable Credentials Data Model v2.0.
- Data and feeds: OSV open source vulnerability database; Our World in Data datasets.
- Couples with: Cyber and digital; Information integrity and trust; Frontier technology; Financial stability and prudential risk.
- Nexus Standards
- 4
- NS-0, NS-10, NS-11
- Open standards
- 5
- named, never copied
- Data and feeds
- 2
- listed for reference
- Couplings
- 4
- with other areas
Constitution and principles
Status proposed · trust, authorisation and assurance · NXS-STD-ST-000004.
| Rule | Text |
|---|---|
NS0-P1 | Open · The standards, their registries, schemas, catalogues and reference tools are published in the canonical repository under the licences recorded in LICENSING.md. Participation in development is open to every community and stakeholder under GOVERNANCE.md. No standard depends on a proprietary artefact, product, account or mark to be applied. |
NS0-P2 | Machine-readable first · Every normative element exists as data (registry, schema, clause) before it exists as prose; prose explains, data governs. A standard with no machine form is not a Nexus Standard. |
NS0-P3 | Identified · Every artefact, record, deployment, policy and clause carries a UNI (NS-1, NS-3, NS-9). Nothing is cited by a name alone. |
NS0-P4 | Verified, not asserted · Conformance is a claim with evidence: receipts, digests, signed attestations and observations (NS-11). A claim without evidence is recorded as a claim, never as a fact, and the supported claim level of the implementation bounds every statement it makes. |
NS0-P5 | Zero trust · Authenticated is not authorised; entitled is not authorised; access is denied by default. Every verification, monitoring and enforcement path assumes no implicit trust between systems, tenants, sites or agents, and records who verified what under which mandate. |
NS0-P6 | Real-time · Standards express obligations that can be evaluated continuously against live records (observations, releases, corrections, deployments), and the standards themselves are versioned so that an implementation can state exactly which version it conforms to at any instant. |
NS0-P7 | Provenance everywhere · Every artefact records what it was derived from, who produced it, under which release and policy decision, and what corrected it (NS-3b, PROV-O profile). Corrections supersede; nothing is silently rewritten. |
NS0-P8 | Honest · A UNI identifies and resolves; it never certifies. legalState defaults to review-required. Readiness, approval and production status are never implied by a standard, a status, a page, a score or a badge. |
NS0-P9 | Nexus-aware · Standards address cross-domain interdependence (water, energy, food, health, biodiversity, climate and the sectors they touch) explicitly: an obligation can reference artefacts in another domain, and cascades are first-class. |
NS0-P10 | Names are governed · Codes are never names. Public names follow the marks policy (governance/OPEN_BOUNDARY_IPR_AND_LICENSING.md, section 7). A system or component is shown by its neutral display name and its UNI; the UNI may change with context (NS-9), and no name infringes anyone’s mark. |
NS0-P11 | Community-owned development · Proposals, comments, decisions and versions of every standard are themselves artefacts with UNIs. The development process is specified (NS-13) and open, and authority to adopt is recorded, never assumed. |
NS0-P12 | Fail closed · Missing evidence, a missing legal state, a missing policy decision or unavailable verification results in a refusal with a typed reason, never in a pass. |
Risk record UNIs (grammar, legacy crosswalk, allocation authority)
Status proposed · trust, authorisation and assurance; canonical risk data, records and provenance · NXS-STD-ST-000003.
NS-3 states its requirements in sections rather than in a table of rules.
Contextual UNIs (deployments, instances, programme instances)
Status proposed · trust, authorisation and assurance · NXS-STD-ST-000005.
| Rule | Text |
|---|---|
NS9-R1 | Each deployment or programme instance shall have one context record; the concept keeps its own UNI; context.ofUni is required and shall resolve. |
NS9-R2 | Context identifiers shall be allocated by the catalogue for their SCOPE; they shall not be derived from names or typed by hand. |
NS9-R3 | The supported claim level, legal state and conformance evidence of a context are its own; they shall not be inherited from the concept or from another context. |
NS9-R4 | Closing a context shall not delete it: context.validUntil is set and the status becomes WITHDRAWN or SUPERSEDED with supersededBy. |
NS9-R5 | Display names in context shall follow the marks policy; the UNI, not the name, is the key everywhere. |
Verification and monitoring (evidence, attestations, zero-trust conformance observation)
Status proposed · trust, authorisation and assurance · NXS-STD-ST-000007.
| Rule | Text |
|---|---|
NS11-R1 | A conformance statement shall rest on an attestation, and an attestation shall name an evaluator, a mandate, evidence references and a digest. |
NS11-R2 | Under zero trust, subject and evaluator shall be distinct, and production evaluations shall run outside the subject’s trust boundary. |
NS11-R3 | Missing or unresolvable evidence shall yield INDETERMINATE or REFUSED, never PASS (NS0-P12). |
NS11-R4 | Attestations shall be append-only and superseded rather than changed; monitoring records shall be observations with record UNIs. |
NS11-R5 | Every displayed conformance value shall carry its evaluation instant and its evaluator; projections shall not store verdicts. |
NS11-R6 | Exports to Verifiable Credentials, in-toto or PROV-O are crosswalks; the Nexus attestation shall remain the record of truth. |
Software, model and AI/ML artefacts (supply chain, model cards, dataset sheets)
Status proposed · software, models and capability lifecycle; trust, authorisation and assurance · NXS-STD-ST-000012.
| Rule | Text |
|---|---|
NS12-R1 | Each software release shall carry a bill of materials, a build attestation and signatures as evidence of the UNI version. |
NS12-R2 | Each model shall carry a model card and each dataset a dataset sheet; both shall cite their sources by UNI. |
NS12-R3 | Agents shall act under recorded mandates and shall be credited as agents; they shall not adopt or certify. |
NS12-R4 | AI governance obligations shall be clauses bound to contextual UNIs and evaluated, not prose assurances. |
Questions and answers.
Are these all the rules for AI and autonomous systems risk?
What does a rule identifier such as NS1-R5 denote?
Around AI and autonomous systems risk.
Shape the standards for ai and autonomous systems risk.
Governments, regulators, standards bodies, industry, academia and communities are invited to shape the catalogue ahead of its first official release, targeted for 2030: comment on a draft, propose a change, join a working group or host a field exercise.
Status and use. The Nexus Standards are proposed standards developed through an open process under NS-13 and published for voluntary use; they do not constitute certification, accreditation or regulatory approval, and adoption remains a decision of the Global Standards Council and, in each country, of its National Standards Council. A UNI (Unique Nexus Identifier) identifies an artefact; it does not certify it. Names of standards bodies and their standards belong to their stewards and are used only to identify the documents; no text of an external standard is reproduced here. Nexus Standards is not affiliated with, endorsed by or certified by any standards body named here.
Licences: CC BY 4.0 for standards text, registries, schemas and data; Apache-2.0 for reference code. External standards are cited by name, number and link under their own licences. Third-party data, libraries and fonts keep their own licences: see Third-party notices.