Edition 1 (January 2024): the essence

Why the newsletter exists

The Commission's 2023 standardisation request to CEN and CENELEC, Decision C(2023)3215, asked for a work programme of European standards supporting the AI Act. It also required appropriate representation and effective participation of stakeholders, SMEs and societal organisations included. Task Group Inclusiveness was created inside JTC 21 to make that requirement real, by keeping a wider audience informed about AI standardisation in CEN-CENELEC, in ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42 and in other fora. The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) provides the secretariat.

The call to action

The lead item concerned a preliminary work item for a European Standard on a Trustworthiness framework, with a ballot deadline of 23 January 2024. Civil society organisations were urged to contact their national standards bodies and influence how their country voted. The framework was intended to complement the standards that give presumption of conformity, addressing fitness for purpose in foreseeable use together with security, privacy, safety and inclusivity across the product lifecycle. The Task Group saw it as a foundation for further trustworthiness standards serving civil society.

Policy context

The issue noted the political agreement on the AI Act reached in December 2023. It also reported on the High-Level Forum on European Standardisation, established by Commission Decision C(2022) 6189. The Forum's plenary on 30 November 2023 received a pledge on education and skills in standardisation and reviewed the Annual Union Work Programme 2024, with AI among its priorities. The Forum's Workstream 12 on AI had held a webinar on the role of standards in the coming AI legislation a week earlier. DG GROW launched a European Standardisation Panel Survey on industry's standardisation needs arising from research and innovation. Finally, StandICT.eu was highlighted as a funding scheme (about EUR 2.9 million) for European experts working in international standards bodies, with AI among its three main target topics.

The JTC 21 pipeline in early 2024

Participation runs through national standards bodies and CEN-CENELEC partner and liaison organisations, and the next plenary was scheduled for Dublin in February 2024. The work was spread across five working groups.

WG1 (strategic advisory) coordinated the response to the standardisation request and ran three task groups on inclusiveness, horizontal and vertical coordination, and technical coherence. WG2 (operational aspects) handled conformity assessment, a risk management standard and risk catalogue then under ballot, adoption and adaptation of SC 42 deliverables, and sector-specific challenges in areas such as healthcare and transport. WG3 (engineering aspects) worked on unwanted bias in machine learning, data governance and quality in the European context, logging, robustness of neural networks, testing guidelines, and natural language processing jointly with ISO. WG4 (foundational and societal aspects) covered sustainable AI, AI-enhanced nudging with ISO, trustworthiness characterisation, and competence requirements for AI ethics professionals. WG5 on cybersecurity for AI systems had just been formed, in November 2023, out of a former task group.

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42

At the international level, the issue pointed to the SC 42 plenary in Seoul in April 2024, to the free availability of ISO/IEC 22989 on AI concepts and terminology, and to the publication of ISO/IEC 42001 on AI management systems in December 2023. Foundational work in progress included an SME guide to 42001, the treatment of generative AI, AI system impact assessment, requirements for bodies certifying AI management systems, and a taxonomy of AI methods and capabilities. The trustworthiness group was working on societal and ethical concerns, a transparency taxonomy, human oversight, explainability and bias.

Inclusiveness in practice

Several contributions showed what participation can look like. Algorithm Audit, a Dutch NGO, published a guide on using stakeholder panels to make bias testing standards more deliberative and transparent, and presented it in JTC 21. Accessibility was traced through the ISO/IEC 25000 (SQuaRE) quality models and into the draft technical report on data governance and quality for AI, which links to the EU Web Accessibility Directive. Small Business Standards was flagged as the voice of SMEs. ANEC, the European consumer voice in standardisation, held two outreach webinars in autumn 2023. There the Commission (DG CNECT) stressed stakeholder participation, fundamental rights and data protection, and alignment with EU values as key elements of the standardisation work. The DIN Consumer Council and Algorithm Audit shared their experience of organising at national level, and the free e-learning course at standards4all.eu was recommended for newcomers.

My reading

This first issue captures the moment civil society was told, clearly, that influence over AI standards is exercised in national mirror committees and not only in Brussels. The trustworthiness framework ballot was the first concrete test. The underlying question it raised is still open: how far fundamental-rights considerations can be carried by standards that are, for the most part, about processes and management systems.

For the live status of each standard, see the Standards Explorer.

Since then (status September 2026)

Stages for the prEN drafts are drawn from public trackers and commentary as of mid-2026. Verify against the live CEN-CENELEC work programme before relying on them. No JTC 21 deliverable gives a presumption of conformity until its reference is cited in the Official Journal.

Correction, 15 September 2026: an earlier version of this table described prEN 18229 as a three-part series. It has been updated to reflect the current five-part structure.