NIST Launches AI Agent Standards Initiative: What Security Teams Need to Know

On February 18, 2026, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched the AI Agent Standards Initiative through its Consortium for the Advancement of Infrastructure for Standards and Innovation (CAISI). This is the first US federal effort specifically targeting governance standards for autonomous AI agents.

What was announced

The initiative recognizes that AI agents — systems that autonomously plan, execute multi-step tasks, and interact with external tools — present risk profiles that existing AI governance frameworks don't fully address. NIST is convening industry, academia, and government stakeholders to develop standards for agent identity, behavioral transparency, and security boundaries.

The three pillars

The initiative is organized around three workstreams:

1. Industry standards for agent interoperability — Common protocols for agent-to-agent communication, capability declarations, and trust negotiation between autonomous systems.

2. Open source governance protocols — Reference implementations for agent security controls including behavioral declarations (like AGENTS.md), capability attestation, and audit trail formats.

3. Agent security research — Formal threat modeling for multi-agent systems, including prompt injection propagation, tool poisoning across agent boundaries, and confused deputy attacks in delegated workflows.

What this means for security teams

Three areas require immediate attention:

Agent identity and authorization. The initiative emphasizes that agents acting on behalf of users need verifiable identity and scoped permissions. Organizations should document which agents have access to which tools and data sources.

Behavioral declarations. NIST is signaling that agents should declare their capabilities and constraints in machine-readable formats. This aligns with the Inkog Verify approach of scanning agent code to verify what an agent can actually do versus what it claims.

Audit trails. Continuous logging of agent decisions, tool invocations, and data access patterns will likely become a baseline expectation. The initiative references existing compliance frameworks including the NIST AI RMF and EU AI Act as foundations.

Key deadlines

• March 9, 2026 — Request for Information (RFI) responses due
• April 2, 2026 — Concept papers due from participating organizations
• April 2026 — Public listening sessions (dates TBD)

Organizations planning to participate should review the full initiative details.

How this connects to NIST AI RMF

The AI Agent Standards Initiative builds on the existing NIST AI Risk Management Framework. Where the AI RMF provides general governance functions (GOVERN, MAP, MEASURE, MANAGE), this new initiative adds an agent-specific layer addressing autonomous behavior, multi-agent coordination, and tool-use security.

Organizations already aligned with the AI RMF have a head start. The governance scanning and behavioral analysis that the RMF requires maps directly to the agent-specific controls this initiative will formalize.

How to prepare now

Start by understanding your current agent security posture. Run a governance scan to identify gaps in human oversight, authorization controls, and audit logging:

npx @inkog-io/cli scan . --policy governance

Document your agents' capabilities, tool access, and decision boundaries. Establish audit trails for agent actions. These steps align with both the NIST AI RMF governance requirements and the direction this new initiative is heading.

For organizations also subject to the EU AI Act, the overlap between US and EU requirements means that early investment in agent governance pays dividends across both regulatory regimes.