The National Science Foundation (NSF) is adopting Zero Trust principles to strengthen its data foundations for artificial intelligence, according to Michael Hauck, the agency’s acting chief data officer and acting chief AI officer, MeriTalk reported.
Speaking at the ServiceNow 2026 Government Forum in National Harbor, Maryland, Hauck said the agency is modernizing its architecture to support enterprise-wide AI deployment. While NSF has long been a data-driven organization, he acknowledged that much of its legacy architecture must be upgraded to make both its data and operational processes AI-ready.
Central to that transformation is the adoption of Zero Trust, particularly its data pillar, which focuses on tightly governing how information moves across systems. As NSF integrates enterprise platforms with cloud collaboration and storage tools through application programming interfaces, the agency is encountering new visibility and governance challenges.
Hauck noted that while ServiceNow handles user interactions, much of the underlying data resides in Microsoft platforms, making it harder to track and control how information flows between systems.
To address this, NSF is deploying comprehensive data catalogs and governance tags aligned with identity and access management policies. However, Hauck emphasized that the absence of standardized data tagging across the federal ecosystem remains a major hurdle in fully operationalizing Zero Trust for data and AI.