An AI chatbot that drafts a bad email is an embarrassment. An AI agent that sends it, to the wrong customer, with the wrong file attached, after approving the wrong refund, is a liability. Singapore’s regulators have clearly been losing sleep over the second scenario.
On Wednesday, the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) announced three initiatives at the AI Assurance Exchange: The Agentic Edition, an event organised by the AI Verify Foundation (AIVF) and SGTech that drew more than 300 deployers and testers. They are a starter kit for testing agentic AI systems, an accreditation programme for third-party AI testers with five firms in its first batch, and a new taskforce to defend the infocomm and media sector against AI-enabled cyber threats.
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Individually, each is a modest piece of guidance. Together, they signal something bigger: Singapore is moving from telling companies how AI governance should work to building an industry whose job is to prove that it does.
Why agents need a different exam
Traditional software follows rules. Generative AI produces content. Agentic AI does something more unnerving: it reasons, acts on a user’s behalf, touches sensitive data and changes the systems around it. Testing only the final output, as most companies do with chatbots, misses most of what can go wrong.
The Starter Kit for Testing Agentic Systems for Safety and Reliability tries to fill that gap with a four-step approach: identify risks such as erroneous or unauthorised actions, design realistic tests without causing real-world damage, run the tests and analyse the logs, then monitor and retest continuously.
The more interesting part is the new vocabulary. The kit asks testers to examine an agent’s entire “trajectory”, meaning both its reasoning and its actions, and to track agent-specific metrics. Tool use accuracy measures whether the agent called the right tool. Handoff accuracy checks whether it passed the task to the right agent or human. Human-in-the-loop rates show how often a person had to step in. It also tackles a problem most enterprises will recognise: how to test a system when you have only black-box visibility, because you bought the agent from a vendor rather than built it.
The kit draws on consultations with government agencies and more than 20 deployers and testers, including Google, AWS and Resaro, and includes case studies from Cohere, CyberSierra, Earlybird AI, Thailand’s KBTG and Knovel Engineering. It extends Singapore’s Model AI Governance Framework for Agentic AI, released earlier this year, and an earlier starter kit for testing large language model apps. IMDA calls it a living document, which is a polite way of admitting that nobody has fully worked this out yet.
The demand is real. In August, a Sumsub and Singapore Fintech Association study found that 94 per cent of Singapore businesses were using or piloting multi-step AI systems, yet only 29 per cent could produce an audit trail for AI-driven decisions. Ninety-eight per cent said they were ready to adopt third-party verification. The market for checking agents exists. The question was who would do the checking.
A badge for the testers
AIVF’s answer is the AI Tester Accreditation Programme (AI TAP), which it bills as a first-of-its-kind scheme for third-party AI testing providers. Applicants go through technical, operational and financial evaluations covering testing competency, track record, delivery capability and financial sustainability. That last criterion is telling. Regulators clearly don’t want an assurance firm folding halfway through an engagement.
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The first five accredited firms are AIDX Tech, Knovel Engineering, PwC Singapore, Resaro and Vulcan. Accreditation lasts one year, so firms have to keep earning it as the technology changes.
The stakes go well beyond enterprise IT. AIVF says the testers will assess applications in healthcare, finance, hiring and public services, the areas where an unchecked agent can quietly reject a job applicant, deny a claim or misroute a citizen’s request without anyone noticing.
Vulcan co-founder Alex Leung put the case bluntly: when AI can “send emails, move data or approve transactions, testing isn’t optional.” Resaro co-CEO April Chin argued that organisations need evidence from testing done outside the development team, not just from the people who built the system.
The questions the badge doesn’t answer
The programme deserves some scrutiny. The release does not say whether any sector regulator will require accredited testing. Without that, AI TAP risks becoming a marketing badge rather than a safeguard.
There is also a small-world problem. Resaro helped inform the starter kit, and Knovel Engineering appears in its case studies. Both are now accredited testers. In a market this young, that overlap is probably unavoidable and not improper. But financial auditing offers a clear lesson about what happens when the firms that write the standards, sell the advice and certify the results are the same few names. PwC’s presence in the first cohort makes the comparison hard to ignore.
Cost matters too. Large banks can afford independent AI audits. A Series A startup in Jakarta or Ho Chi Minh City running customer-facing agents may not, which leaves the free starter kit as its realistic option. Singapore has long pitched its governance toolkits as templates for ASEAN neighbours, and Malaysia is preparing an AI Governance Bill. Whether AI TAP travels across the region will depend on whether it stays affordable.
A taskforce on a 2027 deadline
The third initiative, the Frontier AI Resilience and Security Taskforce (FAIRS), brings together more than 20 leaders from telecommunications, media, cybersecurity and AI. Its focus is the risk that frontier models are getting better at finding vulnerabilities in networks that businesses and government systems depend on.
It has three priorities: faster response to AI-accelerated threats, segmenting critical networks to stop disruption from spreading, and pooling sector-wide intelligence on new attack techniques. Its first report is due in the first half of 2027. Attackers armed with the same models, already behind a wave of deepfake fraud, are unlikely to wait that long.
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Still, the direction is right. As e27 has argued, AI governance is moving from promises to proof. Singapore has now built the exam, chosen the first examiners and set a renewal date. Whether anyone is required to sit the test is the next policy fight.
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