UL Solutions Launches AI Safety Certification: What Product Teams Need to Know
Nov 3, 2025 - Northbrook, IL - UL Solutions (NYSE: ULS) announced new AI safety certification services that assess the safety of AI-enabled products end to end. The goal is clear: build public trust and make responsible adoption practical for product companies.
AI is now embedded in everyday products and industrial systems. When it fails, it can cause real harm, fuel distrust, and introduce unfair outcomes. As UL Solutions' CEO put it, "Establishing the safety of AI-embedded products is absolutely vital for fostering public confidence and helping ensure the responsible and widespread adoption of beneficial AI technologies."
What's in Scope
UL Solutions will evaluate AI-driven products against criteria that product leaders care about: resilience, reliability, transparency, accountability, privacy, fairness, safety, security, and bias risk. This includes systems that learn over time and update wirelessly, where behavior can change after release.
UL 3115: The Certification Framework
The program is guided by UL 3115, Outline of Investigation (OOI) for Safety of AI-Based Products, published Oct. 31. An OOI sets safety criteria for emerging technologies that don't yet have a full UL Standard. Products that meet UL 3115 through testing and assessment may earn the UL Mark, signaling compliance with defined safety requirements.
UL 3115 is built to reference globally recognized standards and help with new regulatory expectations. It maps to international work (e.g., ISO/IEC) and can support alignment with frameworks like the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.
Why This Matters for Product Development
Many products now ship with AI that learns, adapts, and improves post-launch. That's useful for customers, but it also changes risk profiles over time. A certification that accounts for learning systems and wireless updates gives teams a clear bar to build to-and a signal to buyers that safety is taken seriously.
How to Prepare Your Team for UL AI Certification
- Define intended use and foreseeable misuse. Be specific about where AI influences safety or critical functions.
- Map the model lifecycle. Capture data sources, consent and provenance, training runs, evaluation methods, monitoring, and retirement criteria.
- Create transparency artifacts. Produce model cards, data sheets, change logs, and user disclosures that match your claims.
- Set clear accountability. Establish decision rights, approvals, and audit trails for model updates and release gates.
- Test beyond accuracy. Include stress testing, adversarial checks, safety and security testing, privacy risk analysis, and fairness evaluations.
- Plan for updates. OTA policies, rollback procedures, drift detection, incident response, and user notification standards.
- Validate explainability where needed. Make sure user-facing explanations match the product's risk level and claims.
- Trace to recognized frameworks. Show how your controls map to ISO/IEC work and the NIST AI RMF.
- Engage UL early. Ask for a pre-assessment or gap analysis during design to avoid rework late in the cycle.
What UL Solutions Is Offering
UL Solutions will support customers across the product lifecycle-from concept and design to development, deployment, and operations. Alongside certification, they offer advisory services for responsible AI practices and an AI Marketing Claim Verification service to confirm transparency behind AI product claims.
Impact on Roadmaps and Releases
Expect stronger design controls, more rigorous documentation, and clearer update policies. Build certification-readiness into your MLOps: versioning, traceability, monitoring, and rollback aren't extras anymore. Budget time for safety evaluations the same way you do for security and privacy.
Practical Next Steps
- Run an internal gap assessment against the bullets above and prioritize fixes.
- Decide which products or features will seek the UL Mark and plan the evidence you'll need.
- Pilot a release process that treats AI updates like safety-critical changes-reviewed, tested, and reversible.
Resources
About UL Solutions
UL Solutions is a global applied safety science company operating in more than 110 countries. The UL Mark is a widely recognized symbol of trust, and the company provides testing, inspection, certification, software, and advisory services to help customers launch products responsibly and at scale.
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