The U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) launched an AI agent standards initiative in a bid to set standards for AI agents capable of autonomous actions.

The initiative, which is a collaboration with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL), and other federal partners, will focus on ensuring that the next generation of AI agents can function securely on behalf of users and can interoperate smoothly across the digital ecosystem.

This development, coming amid a wave of emerging industry-led AI standards and protocols, is also seen as another step toward the U.S.' bold ambitions to lead the technological frontier.

While AI agents can now perform tasks such as working autonomously for hours, debugging code, managing emails, and even shopping for goods, the real-world use of agents is constrained by their inability to interact with external systems and internal data. As a result, a blind confidence in the reliability of AI agents and their interoperability can lead to a fragmented ecosystem and stunted adoption.

“To address this concern, NIST [and CAISI aim] to foster industry-led technical standards and protocols that build public trust in AI agents, catalyze an interoperable agent ecosystem, and diffuse their benefits to all Americans and across the world,” said the Center for AI Standards and Innovation.

To do this, the government bodies will collaborate with the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other interagency partners to facilitate industry-led development of agent standards and U.S. leadership in international standards bodies. They will also foster a community-led open source protocol development and maintenance for agents, advance research in areas of AI agent security, and promote trusted adoption across sectors of the economy.

In the coming months, NIST will announce research and guidelines for the initiative. To support the interoperable and secure adoption of AI agents, the government body will also welcome public input, including requests for information (RFI) and listening sessions.

The announcement came a month after CAISI issued a still-open RFI about securing AI agent systems, seeking insights from industry, academia, and the security community about the secure development and deployment of AI agent systems.

The request centered around unique security threats affecting AI agent systems, how these threats may change over time, the promise of and possible gaps in existing cybersecurity approaches when applied to AI agent systems, methods for measuring the security of AI agent systems, and approaches to anticipating risks during development.

While OpenAI President and co-Founder Greg Brockman dubbed 2025 as the year of AI agents, a recent report revealed that the agentic hype is partly bolstered by “agent washing” – where firms simply take existing offerings like AI assistants, chatbots, or robotic process automation (RPA) tools and put the agentic label on them. Of the thousands of agentic AI vendors out there, a Gartner report estimated that only 130 of them were the real deal.