AI Watch: Artificial Intelligence Standardisation Landscape Update

Abstract

The European Commission presented in April 2021 the AI Act, its proposed legislative framework for Artificial Intelligence, which sets the necessary regulatory conditions for the adoption of trustworthy AI practices in the European Union. Once the final legal text comes into force, standards will play a fundamental role in supporting providers of concerned AI systems, bringing the necessary level of technical detail into the essential requirements prescribed in the legal text. Indeed, harmonised standards provide operators with presumption of conformity with legal requirements. AI has been an active area of work by many standards development organizations in recent years. In this report, we analyse a set of specifications produced by the IEEE Standards Association covering aspects of trustworthy AI. Several of the documents analysed have been found to provide highly relevant technical content from the point of view of the AI Act. Furthermore, some of them cover important standardization gaps identified in previous analyses. This work is intended to provide independent input to European and international standardisers currently planning AI standardisation activities in support of the regulatory needs. This report identifies concrete elements in IEEE standards and certification criteria that could fulfil standardisation needs emerging from the European AI Regulation proposal, and provides recommendations for their potential adoption and development in this direction.

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