We are witnessing an emerging paradigm shift in which the adoption of large language models (LLMs) has increased significantly across high-stakes, standards-driven industries, particularly in engineering, healthcare, education, and law. In line with EMNLP 2026’s theme of "New Missions for NLP Research", this position paper aims to initiate civil discussion on how the use of LLMs is shaping the future of standard compliance and introduces standard alignment, a targeted research direction towards making LLMs verifiably comply with domain standards. To support the discussion, we propose the Criticality and Compliance Capabilities Framework (C3F) to assess the criticality levels of various standards and pair them with the current compliance capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs as evidenced by the literature. Finally, we argue that advancing standard alignment is key to ensuring safe and trustworthy integration of LLMs across standards-driven industries.