How to get AIUC-1 certified, step by step

What gets certified: one agent, not the company

The unit of certification is a single agentic AI system.³ A company with several agents can certify each of them, or start with one high-risk agent and add the rest later. The certificate covers that product. It does not cover the organization that built it.⁴

Pick the first agent on purpose. Start with the one that can do the most damage: the agent holding production credentials, calling tools that change customer data, or acting without a person approving each step. If a customer has already asked about a specific agent, that settles it.

AIUC also scopes your role. You can be the developer of the agent, the deployer of it, or both.³ If you build the agent and run it for your own customers, you are both. Write that down before the first scoping call.

The timeline in AIUC’s auditor guide

AIUC’s guide for auditors plans the engagement over 12 weeks, counted from kickoff.⁵ The phases overlap on purpose. Evidence collection starts at kickoff and keeps running while AIUC tests the agent, so your engineers work on both at once.

AIUC publishes three durations on three different pages. They are not the same measurement, so read them side by side:

The certification page

4 to 8 weeks.¹

The FAQ

Most certifications finish in 5 to 10 weeks.⁴

The auditor guide

Kickoff about 8 weeks after the contract is signed, then about 10 weeks from kickoff to the certificate.⁵

Plan on the longest reading. Add the auditor guide’s two spans and you get about 18 weeks from a signed contract to a certificate. Give a customer that number if they ask when. A SOC 2 runs on its own clock, covered in how long SOC 2 takes.

Step 1: scope the agent

Scoping fills weeks 1 to 2. You and AIUC do the work, and the auditor signs it off.⁵ It produces three documents, and every later step reads from them:

The agent profile

A written profile of the agent under test: what it does, and what it can reach.

The eval specification

What AIUC will test and how, signed before any testing starts.

The Statement of Applicability

The list of requirements that apply to this agent. The auditor signs it off, and it becomes final when you hand over the evidence.⁶

Exclusions are narrow. A mandatory requirement can leave scope only when the agent genuinely lacks the capability it is written for, and never to save effort.³ Each exclusion needs a one or two sentence justification, and the requirement then reads as not applicable. An agent that calls no tools, for example, gives a tool call requirement nothing to test.

Scope can also grow. Any of the 8 optional requirements, and AIUC’s supplemental controls, can be opted in to make the report stronger. Then the version locks. The release of the standard you start on is fixed at kickoff for the whole engagement, so a new quarterly release halfway through does not move your target.³

Step 2: collect the evidence

Evidence collection runs from week 1 to week 6. It is your job, with support from AIUC, and the pack lives on a shared platform the auditor can open.⁵ AIUC names Drata, Vanta, Fieldguide or the auditor's own platform as places it can live.⁶

Across the 50 active requirements, AIUC lists 140 evidence items.⁷ Of those, 91 are technical implementation, 32 are operational practices, 12 are legal policies and 5 are third-party evals. Expect engineers to produce most of it. The guide to the requirements breaks the items down by domain.

Start from what you already hold. AIUC maps 45 of the 50 requirements to at least one SOC 2 criterion, though a mapping means related evidence, not coverage.⁸ The overlap is mapped domain by domain in AIUC-1 vs SOC 2, and SOC 2 for AI companies covers what a SOC 2 already says about the model provider behind an agent.

You may not need two separate audits either. On October 19, 2026, the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) and AIUC announced one engagement that produces a SOC 2 report and an AIUC-1 certification together.⁹ The joint engagement explains who does which part.

Step 3: the technical evaluations

AIUC runs the evals today. The auditor validates the method and the pass bar, and auditor-led evals are in development.¹⁰ AIUC’s site puts one suite at 1,000 to 5,000 scenarios, mixing ordinary requests with social engineering and adversarial attempts.¹¹

Speed depends on access. An agent AIUC can reach through an API, in a sandbox with realistic data, is quick to test. An agent reachable only through its user interface needs more manual work, which often costs more.¹⁰ Build the sandbox before kickoff. What AIUC-1 costs covers the other factors that set the price.

The evals run in rounds. Week 2 brings the sample run: a small run the client reviews in about 30 minutes. Round 1 fills weeks 3 to 4: the full suite, then a results review of about 30 minutes. Weeks 5 to 6 are remediation. The client fixes every P0 and P1 finding; P2 to P4 fixes are optional. Round 2 takes weeks 7 to 8, and runs only if Round 1 found a P0 or P1.¹⁰

Every finding gets a severity, from P4, the mildest, up to P0, the most severe. Only P1 and P0 stop a certificate.

The pass bar has two parts. At the end of the evals no P0 or P1 finding can be open, and in fieldwork every applicable requirement has to pass.¹⁰ Fixing P2, P3 and P4 findings is your call. Fix the cheap ones anyway. The next quarterly eval tests the same agent.

Step 4: fieldwork, the report and the certificate

Fieldwork belongs to the auditor, in weeks 8 to 10. It ends with a verdict on each requirement, a closing meeting and a target date for the certificate.⁵ The auditor then writes the final audit report on the AIUC-1 template, and AIUC issues the certificate. Nobody else can issue the official one.⁴

Here is what you hold at the end.¹

• The AIUC-1 certificate, issued by AIUC
• An audit report carrying the auditor's attestation and the eval results
• The AIUC-1 badge, which AIUC issues to certified companies for a trust center or sales material

AIUC names Cursor, Fin, ElevenLabs, Harvey, UiPath and KPMG on its site as companies holding an AIUC-1 certificate.¹¹ Keep your own claim modest. No certificate guarantees security: AIUC describes it as a point in time assessment, and says it verifies the safeguards you built rather than building them for you.⁴

Step 5: keeping the certificate

The certificate is valid for 12 months, and AIUC runs evals against the agent at least every 3 months in between.¹² Each year an accredited auditor audits again. That re-audit starts about 2 months before expiry, and it is much lighter than the first one.

The standard moves too. AIUC publishes a release every quarter, on January 15, April 15, July 15 and October 15, with up to 30 days of grace.¹³ The current release is October 15, 2026, and the next is due January 15, 2027. Read each changelog when it lands. Your engagement stays on the release fixed at kickoff. Between audits, check each new release for changes that touch your agent, so the next rescope holds no surprises.

A prep checklist

None of this has to wait for a signed contract. These are the things to have ready before kickoff, in our words rather than AIUC’s, so scoping fits inside its planned weeks and the evals start on time.

• Name the agent. Write down what it does, who uses it, and what it can reach.
• Settle your role. Developer, deployer or both, decided before the first scoping call.
• Map the blast radius. List every tool, API and data store the agent can read from or act on.
• Stand up a sandbox. Realistic data and programmatic access, so AIUC can test without clicking through your interface.
• Pick the evidence platform. Agree with the auditor where the pack lives before kickoff, because collection starts in week 1.
• Reuse your SOC 2 evidence. Mark which items already speak to an AIUC-1 requirement, using the overlap in AIUC-1 vs SOC 2.
• Draft the exclusions. One or two sentences for each excluded requirement, naming the capability the agent lacks.
• Name a fixer. One engineer owns P0 and P1 findings in weeks 5 to 6, with that time kept free.
• Book the quarterly evals. Put a date in each quarter the certificate runs, before the first one is due.
• Ask your SOC 2 firm. Is it on AIUC’s list of accredited auditors, fully or provisionally?