Automating Trust at Scale: Infrastructure-as-Code for Secure and Compliant AI Environments in the U.S.

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly underpin critical operations across U.S. industries, the ability to automate trust at scale has become both a technical necessity and a national imperative. This paper examines how Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) can be strategically leveraged to secure AI ecosystems and enforce regulatory compliance across development-to-production processes. The central challenge lies in maintaining continuous compliance within dynamic, rapidly evolving AI environments, where manual configuration is both error-prone and unsustainable. IaC offers a foundational solution by embedding security and policy enforcement directly into system provisioning, transforming infrastructure deployment into an auditable, repeatable, and verifiable process. Empirical evidence consistently shows that human misconfigurations account for most cloud breaches, emphasizing the need for codified automation to minimize risk and ensure integrity. This study demonstrates that IaC enables consistent, immutable environments across AI development, training, and production stages, significantly reducing configuration drift and vulnerability exposure. Moreover, Policy-as-Code frameworks such as Terraform Sentinel and Open Policy Agent allow regulatory standards, including NIST SP 800-53, FedRAMP, and HIPAA, to be expressed as machine-readable rules enforced in real time. Integrating IaC security tools such as tfsec and Checkov, alongside robust secrets management within CI/CD pipelines, yields measurable improvements in compliance auditing and breach prevention. Through a proposed reference framework and real-world case studies spanning U.S. federal agencies and healthcare systems, this article illustrates how IaC can function as a scalable trust mechanism capable of unifying security, compliance, and automation in AI DevOps. Ultimately, embedding IaC into AI infrastructure is not merely a technical optimization; it is a strategic imperative for national cybersecurity resilience and policy assurance in the era of intelligent systems.