AIES Open Governance Model & RFC Process

The AI Engineering Standard (AIES) is an open-source, community-governed specification. No single company or model vendor owns the standard. Decisions regarding stage gates, prompt engineering schemas, MCP tool contracts, and evaluation standards are driven by public RFCs (Requests for Comments).

Governance Principles

Vendor Neutrality: AIES specifications must remain model-agnostic, supporting open-weights models and proprietary APIs equally.
Evidence-First Verification: Every proposed standard must include reproducible audit criteria, test manifests, or schema validators.
Open Critique: Proposal discussions happen publicly on GitHub Discussions and Pull Requests.

The RFC Lifecycle

Stage 0: Idea (Discussion)

Anyone can propose an enhancement or new standard specification by starting a thread in GitHub Discussions (Category: RFC Ideas).
Community feedback establishes initial interest and refines the scope.

Stage 1: RFC Draft (Pull Request)

Author submits a Pull Request adding RFC-XXXX-title.md to content/governance/rfcs/.
Must follow the official RFC Template.
Status set to Draft.

Stage 2: Community Review (Public Comment)

Minimum 14-day public review period.
Maintainers, practitioners, and enterprise adopters review security implications, schema design, and backward compatibility.

Stage 3: Steering Approval (Final Comment Period)

The AIES Steering Advisory Board reviews the RFC against core principles.
Approval requires a consensus vote (or 2/3 majority of steering board members).

Stage 4: Standard Spec (Merged & Released)

Approved RFCs are merged into the canonical content/ specification and released in the next semver version of AIES.

Steering Advisory Board

The Steering Board oversees governance integrity, release cadence, and cross-framework alignment (NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, OWASP Top 10 LLM).

Members represent enterprise practitioners, open-source maintainers, and security researchers. To apply for a steering board seat, submit an issue tagged governance/steering-board-nomination.