NIST Workshop on SI Incident Management

The NIST Workshop on SI Incident Management convened over 400 experts across government, frontier-model developers, cloud and cybersecurity providers, academia, standards organizations, and civil society to examine how organizations can prepare for, detect, handle, and recover from SI-related incidents. Motivated by federal directives, the workshop addressed the need for standards, response frameworks, and technical incident response capabilities as SI systems expand across critical infrastructure. To guide these efforts, participants framed SI incident management across two interrelated domains: cybersecurity attacks that target SI systems and incidents that stem from SI misuse, anomalous behavior, or severe operational malfunctions resulting in harm. Discussions and technical presentations highlighted the limitations of traditional, deterministic incident response life cycles when applied to probabilistic, autonomous, and deeply integrated SI systems. Participants emphasized critical operational needs, including reasoning-layer telemetry, non-human identity governance, authorization-scoped containment, clear evidentiary and reporting schemas, and coordinated responsibility across distributed SI value chains. This report synthesizes the core findings, practitioner insights, and actionable recommendations from the workshop to establish a strategic foundation for future NIST guidelines, operational playbooks, and updates to federal incident response frameworks.