Capital Markets — Observed Ratings
AIQ™ Observed Ratings
An AI-governance rating for any publicly-listed company, built entirely from public data — no input or involvement needed from the company itself. Read your own public position, or benchmark peers, clients and counterparties.
Outside-in · Not certified
The premise
The frameworks don’t just ask you to quietly govern AI. They explain how to disclose it.
The anchor frameworks — NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, the EU AI Act, the OECD AI Principles, and GDPR — set out 68 specific things an enterprise is expected to disclose publicly about how it governs AI. An Observed rating measures how many of them a company has actually published.
That makes it useful in three directions: see how your own public position reads to an outsider, benchmark competitors, and screen clients, suppliers and portfolio companies — none of which needs their cooperation.
How it works
From public disclosure to a star rating.
Every credited finding is backed by a public source and by the framework clause that calls for it. Provenance is reported separately from the rating, so you can see how directly the evidence is attributable to the company.
68 disclosures the frameworks call for
The full AIQ™ methodology comprises 250 data points. 68 of them are things an anchor framework calls on a company to disclose publicly. Only those are rated, and each is recorded against the specific clause that calls for it — NIST GOVERN 2.1, ISO/IEC 42001 §5.3, EU AI Act Art. 17(1)(j), and so on.
Six parallel collectors, then a counter-verifier
Six collectors gather evidence independently: SEC filings, the company’s own website, AI product screens, regulator records, patents and research, and ESG reports. Each candidate finding is then passed to an independent counter-verifier that attempts to disprove it. A finding scores only if the counter-verifier fails to overturn it.
Tiered, weighted, and expressed in stars
Disclosures are not counted equally. Each carries a tier — Critical, Important, or Advanced — set by how many frameworks call for it, how severe the governance gap is in its absence, and how objectively it can be measured. Tiered results are weighted across the five governance dimensions and reported as a star rating, per dimension and overall.
The rating
A star rating from 0–5, per dimension and overall.
Ratings are expressed in half-star steps, assigned in ten bands across the tiered, weighted result. A star rating records how much of the called-for disclosure was found and published — not a judgment of the company’s underlying governance.
The scale runs 0–5, and the lowest rating awarded is half a star: a company with nothing published rates 0.5 rather than 0. The bottom of the scale is the lowest rating available, not a statement that the company has no AI governance.
What you receive
Six ratings: one for each dimension, and one overall.
A rating is not a single figure. Each of the five governance dimensions is rated on its own, so a company can read strongly in one and thinly in another — which is the point of reading the five together. The overall rating sits alongside them.
| Dimension | Weight | Disclosures | Rated | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Strategic Alignment | 20% | 5 | 60.7% | 3.5 |
| Oversight & Accountability | 30% | 4 | 66.7% | 3.5 |
| Technical Robustness | 25% | 7 | 72.1% | 4.0 |
| Responsible AI & Compliance | 15% | 14 | 69.5% | 3.5 |
| Adaptability & Education | 10% | 3 | 81.3% | 4.5 |
| Overall rating | 100% | 33 | 68.7% | 3.5 |
Shown to demonstrate the format of the deliverable. A real rating names its subject and cites a public source for every credited disclosure. Ratings are issued per company on request.
Collection
Six collectors, working in parallel.
Each collector gathers evidence independently, and each factor is attributed to the one that is its primary source of record.
SEC filings
10-K and 8-K filings, DEF 14A proxy statements, and investor materials. Company-authored, filed with a regulator.
Company website
Responsible AI pages, privacy policies, trust centres, transparency reports, and published technical documentation on the company’s own domain.
AI product screens
What a product actually tells its users: model and service cards, AI disclosure labels, content credentials, data-export and privacy-rights interfaces.
Regulator records
Public registries including the EU AI database, regulatory sandboxes and comment dockets, supervisory participant lists, and enforcement records.
Patents & research
USPTO filings, published research, open-source repositories, and standards-body participation.
ESG reports
Sustainability and CSRD reporting, human-rights impact assessments, and human-capital disclosure.
Counter-verification
Every finding is attacked before it is allowed to score.
A finding that survives collection is handed to an independent counter-verifier whose task is to disprove it — to establish that the disclosure does not say what the collector concluded, that it is not attributable to the company, or that it falls outside the currency window. Findings the counter-verifier overturns are discarded and never reach the rating. Where public sources conflict, the more conservative reading prevails.
Provenance
Where the evidence lives is reported separately from the rating.
A rating says how much of the called-for disclosure was found. Provenance says how directly that evidence is attributable to the company. The two are independent readouts and neither adjusts the other.
Published on the company’s own website or domain. The company controls the page and is the author of record.
Company-authored content hosted elsewhere — an SEC EDGAR filing, for example. The company wrote it; another party publishes it.
Third-party commentary, such as news coverage. Neither authored nor published by the company.
Evidence older than 12 months earns no credit. A disclosure found outside that window is reported as such rather than treated as absent — the frameworks look for current disclosure, so a lapsed one is a lapse, not a gap in our collection.
Where more than one source supports the same finding, the strongest available provenance applies.
What a low rating does and does not mean
A missing disclosure is a missing disclosure.
An Observed rating is built only from what a company has published. Where a called-for disclosure is absent, the rating records that it was not found — not that the underlying control is absent. A company may govern its AI well and disclose little; that company will rate lower than one which governs comparably and publishes what the frameworks call for.
Where a certification claim can be verified against a certifying body’s records and the disclosures that certification calls for are still absent, the report says so. It is a stronger finding, and it carries no additional weight in the rating.
Traceability
Two citations behind every credited finding.
Each credited disclosure is recorded twice over: the framework clause that calls for it, and the public source where it was found. A rating is a statement of opinion, and the factual premises of that opinion are disclosed in full so that any reader — including the rated company — can check them.
The framework clause that calls for the disclosure — for example ISO/IEC 42001 §5.3 or EU AI Act Art. 17(1)(j).
The public document where the disclosure was found, with the date it was retrieved.
A named company may request review of the public data underlying its rating. Engaging AIQA directly converts an Observed rating into a verified AIQ™ Score.
Methodology detail
The mechanics, for anyone who wants them.
A rating is a statement of opinion, and the premises behind it are published rather than summarised. Nothing here is needed to read a rating; all of it is available to check one.
Not an AIQ™ Score
An Observed rating is not an AIQ™ Score and not an AIQA Certification. It runs on its own scale, measures a different thing, and is not comparable to a verified AIQ™ Score. Certification comes only through a direct engagement and cannot be earned through an Observed rating.
Coming next
Inferred Ratings
Observed ratings speak only to the 68 disclosures the frameworks call for publicly. Inferred ratings will map observed disclosure against the full 250-point corpus. They are in development and are not yet issued.
What Inferred Ratings will doAIQ™ Observed Ratings and AIQ™ Scores are statements of opinion as of the date expressed, not statements of current or historical fact.
For informational purposes only. Not investment, legal, tax, or compliance advice, and not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security, or to do (or refrain from doing) business with any entity.
Every credited finding in an Observed Rating cites the framework clause that calls for the disclosure and the public source where it was found. The rating scale, the tiering, the dimension weights, and the behaviour of that weighting are published with the methodology.
Provided “as is” without warranties of any kind. An Observed Rating is built from public information without the subject company’s participation and reflects only what that company has published. Where a called-for disclosure is absent, the rating records that it was not found — not that the underlying governance control is absent. Ratings do not constitute regulatory compliance, certification, or legal assurance. A named company may request review of the underlying public data.
AIQ™ and AIQ Score™ are trademarks of AIQA Global, LLC. Scores do not constitute regulatory compliance, legal advice, or investment advice. No assurance is provided regarding future performance, risk outcomes, or insurance eligibility.