Adam Leon Smith, Chair of the AIQI Consortium

As the EU AI Act implementation deadline approaches, it has become clear that the harmonised standards will not be ready in time. This is not a surprise to many people involved in the work, but the formal delays have now brought the implementation timeline of the law itself into question. 

Recent months have exposed significant challenges within CEN-CENELEC’s standardisation process. Controversies over working methods, participation rules, and governance have sparked heated debates among the hundreds of experts involved. These reflect genuine tension between moving quickly enough to support the August 2026 deadline and ensuring the standards are technically sound and achieve broad consensus. 

What many do not appreciate is the sheer scale of this undertaking. The CEN-CENELEC Joint Technical Committee on Artificial Intelligence (CEN/CLC JTC 21) represents something unprecedented in European standardisation: the largest and most inclusive committee structure anyone in the standards community has witnessed. With multiple working groups, hundreds of participating experts from across 35 countries, and intense scrutiny from both industry and civil society, the committee is navigating uncharted territory. 

Adding to the confusion, there is widespread misunderstanding about how many standards are actually being developed to support the AI Act. Some sources incorrectly cite figures as high as 40 standards, when the reality is quite different.  

This increasingly matters. Regulatory compliance depends on understanding which standards will provide presumption of conformity and when they will be ready. AI providers must plan their conformity assessment strategies.  

Until now, getting a clear picture has required insider access to committee meetings or piecing together fragments from meeting minutes and draft work programmes. This is simply the nature of the standards process. However, now that the first standards are being shared with the public for comment, more can be said based on their content  

That is why I have built ai-act-standards.com, a freely accessible platform (reproducible with attribution) that visualises the entire landscape of the EU AI Act harmonised standards development. The interactive tool provides regularly updated information drawn directly from official CEN-CENELEC sources and maps the standards being developed, their current status, target completion dates, and how they relate to specific AI Act requirements.  

If you are implementing AI systems, preparing for market surveillance responsibilities, or simply trying to understand how the regulatory puzzle pieces fit together, the tool will be useful in getting having clarity, reducing speculation and confusion.