The American Bankers Association and Bank Policy Institute this week urged the National Institute for Standards and Technology to focus on developing voluntary and technology-neutral guidance for how businesses and other organizations can safely deploy agentic artificial intelligence.
The Center for AI Standards and Innovation – which is part of NIST – last month announced the launch of an initiative to ensure that AI agent systems can be widely and securely deployed. As part of a request for information from CAISI, ABA and BPI recommended the center convene stakeholders to develop a concise set of voluntary, consensus-based outputs for adoption of the technology.
Specifically, CAISI should develop a risk-scaled controlled-sharing profile that would serve a “nutrition label” approach to transparency in financial services: “a standard baseline set of information for due diligence, with an added layer when risk or complexity is higher,” the associations said.
The associations also said CAISI should publish nonbinding reference architectures and practice guides that demonstrate secure implementations for counterparty interactions and automated integrations.
“These actions would keep guidance voluntary and technology-agnostic while providing practical examples and illustrative validation approaches that can be tailored by risk and operational context,” they said.
The letter continues the associations’ current efforts in the AI space, notably their collective support of the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.
