AIUC-1: Who Can Audit You, and How It Differs From SOC 2

Key facts

Controls: About 50 requirements across six domains, each with core and supplemental controls (AIUC's pages say 50 and 51, and the count changes with its quarterly releases)
Recertification cycle: 12-month certificate, renewed by an annual re-audit
Ongoing oversight: Technical evaluations by AIUC at least every 3 months
Public registry: AIUC's accredited-auditor list ↗
Related standards: SOC 2ISO 42001NIST AI RMFEU AI ActOWASP Top 10 for Agentic ApplicationsCSA AI Controls Matrix

What is AIUC-1?

AIUC-1 is a security, safety and reliability standard for AI agents, maintained by the Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company (AIUC) in San Francisco. First released on 22 July 2025 and revised every quarter, it covers six domains: data and privacy, security, safety, reliability, accountability, and society. It applies only to agentic AI systems, and a certificate usually covers named agents or products rather than the whole company.

Is AIUC-1 a certification or an attestation?

AIUC-1 is a certification, and only AIUC issues it. An accredited audit firm reviews the controls and recommends certification; AIUC runs the technical evaluations, reviews the auditor's report and signs the certificate. SOC 2 works the other way: a licensed CPA firm attests to your controls in its own report, and no central body issues anything. AIUC says AIUC-1 does not duplicate SOC 2, so the two sit side by side.

AIUC-1 vs SOC 2: what is the difference?

SOC 2 tells a buyer how your company protects data. AIUC-1 tells them how specific AI agents behave under attack and whether their actions are controlled. AIUC says AIUC-1 does not duplicate SOC 2, so a buyer of an AI agent may ask for both. AIUC-1 is sometimes called "SOC 2 for AI agents"; AIUC is the company and AIUC-1 its standard.

Aspect	AIUC-1	SOC 2
Who issues it	AIUC, after an accredited firm's audit	A licensed CPA firm, in its own attestation report
What is examined	Named AI agents or products	The company's system and its controls, at a point in time (Type 1) or over a period (Type 2)
Which risks it tests	Adversarial prompts, jailbreaks, hallucinations, unsafe tool calls and data leakage, tested on the agent itself	Whether the company's controls for security and any other selected criteria are designed and operating
Testing	AIUC red-teams the agent, typically with 1,000 to 5,000 scenarios	The auditor tests controls; adversarial testing of AI behavior is not required
How long it lasts	12-month certificate, with retests at least every quarter	Each report covers a past date (Type 1) or period (Type 2); most companies renew yearly
Who checks the auditors	AIUC accredits the firms itself	CPA firms are licensed by state boards and peer reviewed under AICPA rules
What a buyer receives	A certificate for your trust center; the report on request	The report, usually shared under NDA
Which comes first (our view)	Usually second, as an addition to a SOC 2 report rather than a replacement for it	Usually first, because enterprise security reviews ask for a SOC 2 report by name

What does AIUC-1 test?

Six domains. Each requirement is mandatory or optional; only Safety, Security and Accountability carry optional ones. The examples are requirement IDs from AIUC's published control index, which changes with each quarterly release.

Domain	What it tests	Example requirement
Data and privacy	How the agent uses data, intellectual property and trade secrets, personal data, cross-customer exposure and secrets leakage	A008 secrets leakage (added July 2026)
Security	Adversarial testing, input filtering, access controls, endpoint protection and secure code patterns	B006 approved MCP servers only and sandboxing; B010 secure patterns in generated code
Safety	Risk taxonomy, pre-deployment and third-party testing, and harmful or out-of-scope outputs	C007 flag high-risk outputs for human review
Reliability	Hallucination prevention and testing, and restricting unsafe tool calls	D003 tool-call authorization and logging, including the MCP tool name and its inputs
Accountability	Failure plans, ownership, vendor due diligence, logging, transparency and quality management	E009 third-party API connections (mandatory since April 2026)
Society	AI-enabled cyber misuse and catastrophic misuse	F001 prevent AI cyber misuse

Which audit firms can audit you for AIUC-1?

Only firms AIUC has accredited, plus AIUC itself, which says it conducts some AIUC-1 audits directly, for example for new agent capabilities. Its published list names Schellman, with full accreditation since 1 November 2025, and six firms with provisional accreditation while AIUC witnesses one of their audits: Coalfire, BDO, Grant Thornton, Mastermind, Sensiba and A-LIGN. KPMG holds an AIUC-1 certificate for one of its own products; it is not an accredited auditor.

The claim	Who issues it	What it actually proves
"AIUC-1 certified", said of an AI product	AIUC, after its own technical evaluations and an accredited firm's audit	The named agent or product passed AIUC's tests and an accredited firm's control review within the last 12 months. It covers only the agents in scope, so read the scope on the certificate before relying on it for another product from the same company.
"Accredited AIUC-1 auditor"	AIUC, which accredits audit firms itself	The firm may perform AIUC-1 audits. Full accreditation means AIUC has watched the firm satisfactorily complete a witness audit; provisional means that witness audit is still under way. Neither status is granted by an independent accreditation body.
"Supports AIUC-1" or "mapped to AIUC-1", said of a tool or a policy set	The vendor or company itself	That AIUC-1's requirements are mapped for tracking, as a compliance platform maps them into its control library. Nobody tested an agent or audited a control, so it is not certification.

AIUC-1 accredited auditors in our directory

Firm	Accreditation	Checked
Schellman	Full since 1 Nov 2025	2026-10-12
A-LIGN	Provisional since 1 Aug 2026	2026-10-12
Coalfire	Provisional since 1 May 2026	2026-10-12
Grant Thornton	Provisional since 15 Jul 2026	2026-10-12
Sensiba LLP	Provisional since 1 Aug 2026	2026-10-12

Source: AIUC's accredited-auditor list ↗, checked 2026-10-12. Full accreditation is listed first, then provisional, each alphabetically. Payment plays no part in who appears here or in what order.

Firms in our directory on AIUC's accredited-auditor list: 5

A firm appears in the table only when AIUC's own accredited-auditor list names it, checked on the date shown. Grant Thornton is matched to the US firm, which announced its provisional accreditation on 23 September 2026. BDO and Mastermind are on that list but are not matched to a firm here: the list does not say which BDO member firm holds the accreditation, and Mastermind has no profile in our directory.

Who needs AIUC-1?

Companies that sell AI agents to enterprises whose security teams now ask what the agent can do and how it was tested. AIUC lists Cursor, ElevenLabs, Harvey, Lovable, UiPath, Intercom's Fin and KPMG's aIQ Capture platform among its certified products. AIUC-1 answers agent questions a SOC 2 report is not built to test: resistance to adversarial prompts and hallucination testing, run against the agent itself. Authorization of tool calls (including MCP servers) can fall under SOC 2's logical access criteria, while AIUC-1 tests it directly on the agent.

How does AIUC-1 certification work?

AIUC describes four steps: scoping, technical evaluations, the audit, and certification, followed by retests every quarter. AIUC tests the agent; the audit firm reviews the controls around it.

Scoping (about 1 to 2 weeks): You, AIUC and the auditor decide which agents and use cases are in scope. Each requirement is mandatory or optional, the auditor signs off a Statement of Applicability recording what applies, and the scope is printed on the certificate and the report, so a buyer can see exactly which agent was certified.
Technical evaluations, run by AIUC: AIUC itself red-teams the agent, typically with 1,000 to 5,000 test scenarios according to its homepage, and you fix what fails. The audit firm does not run these tests. Published examples range from more than 900 tests (KPMG's aIQ Capture) to 5,835 (ElevenLabs).
Audit by an accredited firm: The audit firm reviews policy, operational and technical controls across the six domains and collects evidence, then writes a report that recommends certification or not. Controls added in 2026 cover approved MCP servers only, sandboxing, and authorizing and logging each tool call, including the MCP tool name and its inputs.
Certification by AIUC: AIUC reviews the auditor's report, signs the certification statement and issues a certificate valid for 12 months, meant for your trust center. The report itself is shared on request rather than published.
Quarterly retests and annual re-audit: Technical evaluations repeat at least every three months. A full re-audit by an accredited firm renews the certificate each year, starting about two months before expiry, usually against the latest version of the standard with up to 30 days' grace.

What does AIUC-1 cost and how long does it take?

Range No published price / 4 to 12 weeks

No price is published. AIUC quotes its own fee separately from the auditor's, based on how complex the agent is, what it can access and act on, and how the test environment is set up, and each audit firm sets its own fee. AIUC's pages give different timelines: four to eight weeks on its certification page, five to ten weeks in its FAQ, and about ten weeks in its guide for auditors, whose schedule puts the report and certificate in weeks 10 to 12. The same guide sets kickoff about eight weeks after the contract is signed, so allow for that lead time too. UiPath's first certification took eight weeks. After that come retests at least every quarter and an annual re-audit, which AIUC describes as substantially lighter than the first.

Source: AIUC: scope and price (guide for auditors) ↗

One thing to watch

AIUC writes the standard, runs the technical tests, accredits the audit firms, issues the certificates and sells AI insurance. ISO 42001 has an independent accreditation layer (national bodies such as ANAB accredit the certifiers); AIUC-1 has none, so a certificate rests on AIUC's own authority. The standard also changes every quarter (15 January, April, July and October), and AIUC's own pages give the requirement count as both 50 and 51, so confirm the version and scope your auditor will use before you sign.

Sources

Last verified 2026-10-12. Found a stale or wrong source? Email hello@soc2auditors.org.

Go deeper on this

Ready to act on AIUC-1?

AIUC-1 does not replace a SOC 2 report: AIUC says it deliberately avoids duplicating what SOC 2 covers. If you need both, an accredited firm can quote them together, but they are separate engagements with different issuers, and the SOC 2 auditor should not be the firm that built the controls it tests.

Other frameworks buyers ask about

SOC 2 Type 1 $7.5K–$30K / 3–6 months SOC 2 Type 2 $12K–$100K / 6–15 months ISO 27001 Scope-priced audit and implementation / three-year certificate cycle ISO 42001 $4K–$505K vendor figures / 3–6 months HIPAA $4K–$60K assessment / 2–8 weeks PCI DSS $1K–$200K / 3–12 months

See all frameworks →