Closing the Gap: Achieving NIST AI 600-1 Compliance with AI-SPM

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed the technology landscape. Powerful new AI capabilities are now widely accessible thanks to advanced developer tools. Over the past two years, we've witnessed an explosion of AI-powered applications, with organizations racing to embed conversational interfaces, predictive analytics, and automated support systems into their products.

However, this surge in adoption has outpaced regulatory frameworks and industry standards. While regulation is still taking shape—especially with the EU AI Act setting early benchmarks—leading guidance such as NIST AI 600-1 is now charting the course for responsible and secure AI adoption.

Today, we’ll explore NIST AI 600-1, the leading AI security standard, and show how Zscaler AI-Security Posture Management (AI-SPM) can help your organization accelerate and simplify compliance.

What is NIST AI 600-1?

NIST AI 600-1—also known as the AI Risk Management Framework (RMF)—was developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to help organizations manage risks across the AI lifecycle. The framework focuses on four core pillars: governance, mapping, measuring, and managing risk. Its comprehensive approach addresses critical concerns including privacy, security, fairness, bias, transparency, and accountability.

NIST AI 600-1 builds on the foundation of NIST AI RMF 1.0 with specific guidance for generative AI, addressing challenges like model hallucinations and information integrity. Trustworthiness—covering validity, safety, security, and fairness—remains at the heart of the framework.

Organizations across industries are embracing NIST AI 600-1 both to establish baseline security practices and to reinforce governance as their AI initiatives mature. Although global regulation is still developing, aligning with industry standards now will significantly reduce the time and effort needed for compliance when formal regulations arrive.

Accelerating AI Compliance with Zscaler AI-SPM

Zscaler AI-SPM is fully integrated to our DSPM solution. It is purpose-built to streamline compliance with AI standards such as NIST AI 600-1. Here’s how it works:

Discover Deployed AI Models

A key challenge in AI governance is keeping track of all deployed models and inference APIs, especially with the proliferation of both open-source and custom solutions. NIST AI 600-1 specifies guardrails—including content filters—to prevent misuse.

Zscaler AI-SPM simplifies this process by automatically discovering all AI models and related components within your environment, providing a clear view of your AI footprint.

Secure Data

AI models are only as safe as the data they’re trained and evaluated on. Misconfigured cloud resources or exposed application endpoints can inadvertently leak sensitive training or inference data—or even introduce poisoned data that undermines model integrity. NIST 600-1 mandates controls to prevent such vulnerabilities.

Zscaler AI-SPM automatically locates datasets used in AI training and inference across your cloud environment—including data, document stores and vector databases. It flags misconfigurations like publicly accessible training data, giving your security teams the insight needed to investigate, remediate, and prove compliance.

Through its advanced data classification engine, Zscaler AI-SPM also identifies sensitive data relevant to regulatory frameworks like GDPR or HIPAA, helping you map risk to compliance requirements automatically.

Manage and Prioritize Compliance Risk

Once AI models and data are identified, Zscaler analyzes your security and compliance posture—highlighting high-priority risks and misconfigurations with the complete context of how each dataset is used. Policy frameworks, customizable roles, and compliance dashboards support your review and documentation of AI data flows throughout their lifecycle.

With Zscaler, you get instant, actionable visibility—both at a broad and granular level—into your compliance posture. In just a few clicks, you can trace risks to specific datastores or records and see how close you are to meeting your target frameworks.

Take the Next Step: Responsible AI, Powered by Zscaler

Zscaler AI-SPM, with integrated AI-SPM, delivers continuous monitoring, visibility, and remediation guidance while supporting your AI initiatives that need to stay secure and compliant with leading standards like NIST AI 600-1, GDPR or HIPAA.

With broad multi-cloud coverage and powerful data-centric capabilities, Zscaler AI-SPM is purpose-built to surface and control new AI risks—empowering your organization to innovate responsibly while maintaining the highest data protection standards.

Ready to accelerate your AI compliance journey? Request a demo today to see Zscaler AI-SPM in action.

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