The U.S. Department of Labor Defined AI Literacy. AISA Already Measures All of It.

In February 2026, the U.S. Department of Labor issued Training and Employment Notice No. 07-25 — a formal directive sent to every state workforce board, every American Job Center, every community college, and every Job Corps center in America. The message: integrate AI literacy into everything you do.

The attached AI Literacy Framework defines what AI literacy means for the American workforce. It establishes five foundational content areas and seven delivery principles that should guide AI education and training programs nationwide.

We cross-referenced every sub-competency in the DOL's framework against AISA's 11-criterion assessment rubric. The result: AISA covers 100% of the DOL's framework — all 25 sub-competencies across all 5 content areas — and goes significantly deeper in every area.

What the DOL Framework covers

The DOL defines AI literacy as "a foundational set of competencies that enable individuals to use and evaluate AI technologies responsibly, with a primary focus on generative AI." The framework is organised into five content areas:

1. Understand AI Principles — core concepts, capabilities, limitations, training and inference, hallucinations, human oversight
2. Explore AI Uses — productivity tools, information support, creative assistance, task-specific applications, decision-support
3. Direct AI Effectively — contextual framing, prompting techniques, supplying relevant data, iterating on outputs, avoiding vague prompts
4. Evaluate AI Outputs — verifying accuracy, assessing completeness, spotting logical errors, aligning with strategic intent, applying human judgment
5. Use AI Responsibly — protecting sensitive information, following workplace policies, avoiding misuse, managing context-specific risks, maintaining accountability

Each area contains five sub-competencies, for a total of 25.

How every DOL sub-competency maps to AISA

Area 1: Understand AI Principles → U1 + T2

The DOL wants workers to understand what AI is and how it works. AISA's U1 (AI Fundamentals) criterion scores exactly this — from "complete black box, no mental model of how AI works" (1-2) to "system-level fluency — understands training, inference, fine-tuning, retrieval at architecture level" (9-10).

T2 (Limitation Awareness) adds the ability to predict failure before it happens — moving beyond knowing hallucinations exist to understanding why they occur and adjusting approach preemptively.

Area 2: Explore AI Uses → U2 + W1 + W3 + W2

The DOL treats this as one content area. AISA decomposes it into four separate criteria — each measuring a distinct skill:

Area 3: Direct AI Effectively → P1 + P2 + P3

The DOL's "directing AI" is AISA's entire Prompting & Communications dimension — three criteria covering prompt structure, iteration quality, and context architecture:

The DOL lists "iterating on outputs" as one of five sub-skills under prompting. AISA treats iteration as a standalone criterion (P2) because Anthropic's 10,000-conversation study proved it's the single strongest predictor of overall AI fluency.

Area 4: Evaluate AI Outputs → T1 + T2

Area 5: Use AI Responsibly → S1

AISA's S1 rubric includes a key boundary at 6→7: do they go beyond personal caution to consider impact on others, categories of AI failure, and adapting scrutiny to stakes? The DOL's sub-competencies sit primarily in the 5-6 range. AISA scores the full 1-10 spectrum, from no awareness to shaping AI policy for others.

Where AISA goes beyond the framework

The DOL framework defines competencies. AISA measures them — and adds skills the DOL doesn't isolate:

P2 (Iterative Dialogue) as a standalone criterion. The DOL buries iteration as 1 of 5 prompting sub-skills. AISA treats it as a top-priority criterion because Anthropic's empirical data showed iteration quality is the single strongest predictor of AI fluency.

W2 (Task Decomposition). Not named in the DOL framework at all. How someone breaks a problem into AI-suitable versus human-judgment pieces is a core workflow competency that separates a Tactician from a Conductor in AISA's persona system.

P3 depth — context architecture. The DOL says "supplying relevant input data." AISA's P3 scores from ad-hoc pasting (3-4) to multi-conversation workflows, persistent memory layers, and reusable system prompts (9-10).

Calibrated proficiency depth (1-10). The DOL defines binary competencies — can the worker do X? AISA scores a 10-point rubric per criterion, calibrated by a separate Opus-model review pass. The difference between "checks sometimes, but not systematically" (3-4) and "verification baked into architecture — automated checks, human-in-the-loop gates" (9-10) is seven levels of granularity the DOL doesn't reach.

DOL's delivery principles — already in AISA's DNA

The framework also defines seven principles for how AI literacy should be delivered. AISA's methodology already embodies every one:

The framework defines the standard. The assessment measures it.

The DOL explicitly acknowledges that defining competencies is not enough: "employers and other stakeholders may need to define the specific AI skills and depth of knowledge, or levels of proficiency, appropriate for each role and context."

That sentence describes exactly what AISA does — 11 criteria, each with calibrated 1-10 rubric anchors, role-adaptive questioning, and a post-session Opus calibration pass that produces proficiency levels, persona classification, and actionable reports.

The DOL defined what AI literacy means for the American workforce. AISA measures whether your team has it.

Two independent validations. One assessment.

This is the second major external framework to confirm AISA's assessment covers the right skills:

Both were developed independently of AISA. Both confirm that AISA's criteria map to what the best available evidence says AI literacy looks like.

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Independence note: AISA was designed and built independently, before the publication of the DOL's AI Literacy Framework. The U.S. Department of Labor does not own, endorse, accredit, or directly contribute to AISA. TEN 07-25 and the attached AI Literacy Framework are publicly available government guidance. This comparison is our own analysis of how our pre-existing assessment framework aligns with the DOL's published competency areas.

Source: Training and Employment Notice No. 07-25, U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (February 13, 2026). Attachment I: The Department of Labor's Artificial Intelligence Literacy Framework.