Demand and Incentives for External AI Assurance

While critical for ensuring trust in AI, independent assurance is still underutilized.

External assurance helps organizations demonstrate the safety, quality, and reliability of AI systems, while enabling regulators and the public to hold AI actors accountable. It is one of the most important mechanisms for establishing justified trust across the AI ecosystem.

Yet today, demand for independent assurance does not reflect its value. Assurers often face barriers to accessing the systems, components, and documentation needed to conduct meaningful evaluations.

PAI’s report, Demand and Incentives for External AI Assurance, examines how to close this gap. As the third output of PAI’s initiative, Strengthening the AI Assurance Ecosystem, it explores what drives demand for assurance, why it remains limited, and what policy, market, and institutional interventions are needed to scale its adoption.

Key Takeaways

This report identifies the main factors shaping demand for independent AI assurance and the role insurance can play in supporting the ecosystem. Understanding these drivers and constraints is essential for policymakers, industry, and other stakeholders seeking to scale assurance adoption and build justified trust in AI.

Demand and Incentives

• Regulation, liability, or market expectations drive demand for independent assurance. Demand will grow with increasing quality across the independent assurance sector. Steps to build justified trust in assurers, discussed in Part 2, will help address this issue.
• Demand will grow with increasing appreciation of AI risks and the benefits of assurance. Steps should be taken to improve awareness of AI risks across the value chain while increasing awareness of the role assurance can play in addressing risk.
• Incentives to facilitate assurer access to AI systems, models, other AI components, and relevant documentation may come from growing demand from procurers and the public for assured AI. But ensuring such access may also require more direct policy action.
• Insurance can play a role in building out the assurance ecosystem, and it will ultimately drive increased engagement of independent assurance. In the short term, the insurance industry needs further development in the assurance ecosystem before it can fully realize this potential.

Insurance

• Insurance can work synergistically with assurance to address certain AI risks and promote trustworthiness.
• Many of the elements needed to promote AI insurance are the same as those needed to promote AI assurance; insurance is not a ready-made lever to promote assurance uptake.
• The “virtuous circle” encompassing insurance and assurance will, in part, develop organically, but insurers, policymakers, and other policy actors can take steps to accelerate the process.
• Insurance will primarily address risks associated with legal liability; it is not suited to address all categories of AI risk.

This report is Part 3 of PAI’s Strengthening the AI Assurance Ecosystem. Read the rest of the series below.

Part 1 — Strengthening the AI Assurance Ecosystem

Part 2 — Building Justified Trust in AI Assurers