AI Safety Framework for Public Institutions
A structured approach to evaluating, procuring, deploying, and overseeing artificial intelligence in government and enterprise environments, with risk assessment matrices and implementation guidance.
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AI Safety Framework for Public Institutions
A ~14-minute audio interview about the report with Dr. Krzysztof Pietroszek, President of FAIR Labs. Produced with www.allais.com.
Summary
The bottom line for decision-makers
Institutions do not need to become AI research labs to deploy AI safely. They need a disciplined way to decide which systems warrant which level of scrutiny, a catalog of controls tied to the stages of a system's life, a procurement process that extracts honest evidence from vendors, clear lines of human accountability, and a monitoring regime that treats deployment as the beginning of oversight rather than the end. This report supplies each of these as a ready-to-adapt instrument.
A structured approach to evaluating, procuring, deploying, and overseeing artificial intelligence in government and enterprise environments, with risk assessment matrices and implementation guidance.
Key findings
- Tier before you build or buy. Classify every candidate system by consequence-of-failure and reversibility before any technical evaluation. The tier sets the evidentiary bar for everything that follows.
- Make the vendor prove it. Shift the burden of demonstrating safety onto suppliers through structured documentation requirements, acceptance testing, and contractual commitments to postdeployment cooperation.
- Name a human who is answerable. Every deployed system must have a designated accountable official with the authority to pause it. Oversight that no one owns is oversight that does not happen.
How to cite this report
AI Safety Framework for Public Institutions. FAIR Labs Policy Report. Fair Artificial Intelligence Research Labs, 2026. Available at https://fairlabs.ai/research/ai-safety-framework
FAIR Labs (Fair Artificial Intelligence Research Labs) is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) research institute in Washington, DC. Its reports may be reproduced with attribution for non-commercial purposes. For interviews, briefings or data requests, use the contact form.