Autonomous technologies perform tasks with a high degree of autonomy and often employ artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate human cognition, intelligence, and creativity. Because these systems are critical to our safety, health, well-being, and to the fabric of our system of commerce, new research and engineering methodologies are needed to ensure that they behave in safe, reliable, and acceptable ways.

Assured AI is critical to ensuring autonomous systems can be trusted to perform as intended, both alone and as part of a team. They must perceive, decide, act, and learn as intended, cause no harm, and be impervious to attack.

Autonomous algorithms must be repeatable, verifiable, and unbiased. Ultimately, assurance is achieved when the algorithms work in a repeatable and verifiable fashion without unintended biases in all the contexts for which they were designed to operate. New techniques are needed to ensure AI algorithms are validated, verified, and unbiased.