Edition 14 (April 2026): the essence

About this issue

The newsletter is published on the JTC 21 website, the JTC 21 LinkedIn group and the ETUC website, with ETUC providing the secretariat. As before, it notes that ongoing projects are confidential and that details should be requested from national standards bodies. Most of this issue is devoted to the 14th JTC 21 plenary.

News from the European Union

The Digital Omnibus. In 2025 the Commission proposed ten "Omnibus" packages, each amending several EU acts at once to reduce administrative burden. The digital package covers data, cybersecurity and AI. The newsletter expected the AI Omnibus to affect the AI Act's implementation timeline and, with it, the development of the harmonised standards. At the time of writing, trilogue negotiations were expected to continue until 28 April. Any amendments were expected to be adopted before 1 August 2026, when the Annex III high-risk obligations were then due to apply, and a possible postponement of certain provisions was under discussion.

CEN-CENELEC JTC 21: the 14th plenary

The plenary was held online from 11 to 13 March 2026, with about 170 participants from 21 European countries, observers from Japan, and representatives of civil society and professional organisations. The Commission took an active part, and the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights attended a JTC 21 plenary for the first time.

The Commission's messages. Faster procedures are welcome, but not at the expense of quality. Drafts sent to public enquiry must be sufficiently mature. The shortage of technical contributions remains a key challenge.

The Commission's role. The Commission described its role as overseeing timely implementation of the standardisation request; supporting acceleration, including by assessing draft deliverables; providing ongoing expertise on the AI Act; contributing to the AI Board's subgroup on standards and coordinating with Member States; funding JTC 21, including through grants; and issuing guidance where appropriate.

Published European AI documents. The list of CEN-CENELEC publications had grown. Alongside the documents listed in earlier issues, it now includes EN ISO/IEC 12792:2025 (transparency taxonomy) and EN ISO/IEC 5259-1 to 5259-4 (data quality for analytics and machine learning). In addition, ISO/IEC 42001 had been approved for direct adoption as a European standard.

Enquiries and joint drafts. The public enquiry on prEN ISO/IEC 25059 (quality models for AI systems) had just closed. Committee drafts of the three-part CEN/CLC ISO/IEC/TS 22440 on functional safety and AI systems (requirements, guidance and application examples), consulted in parallel in SC 42 and JTC 21, were approved with comments.

Working group reports

WG1 (strategic advisory). Timeline. Timelines were being closely monitored. All standards scheduled for submission to public enquiry by 15 February 2026 were delivered on time. Full coverage of the standardisation requirements was, however, not expected before 2027.

Technical Coherence Forum. The forum works to prevent inconsistencies, gaps and overlaps between working group deliverables. It had agreed a common JTC 21 definition of "interested parties": a person, group or organisation that can affect, be affected by, or perceive itself to be affected by a decision or activity.

Task Group Inclusiveness. Besides producing this newsletter, the task group published a summary of its survey results. It was about to send a questionnaire to national standards bodies on civil society participation at national level, covering the role of civil society organisations, supporting national policies, barriers, good practices and evaluation.

WG2 (operational aspects). The group's focus was on delivering the operational standards under the request, making sure each editorial team has enough people to finish. Risk management: prEN 18228 was ready for public enquiry. Quality management system: for prEN 18286 the enquiry was closed and all comments reviewed; after the harmonised standards review, the draft was ready for formal vote by the national standards bodies.

Conformity assessment. The AI conformity assessment framework was still in preparation, with a workshop in Luxembourg on 28–30 April expected to move it forward. Certification bodies: a ballot on direct adoption of ISO/IEC 42006:2025 (requirements for bodies certifying AI management systems) ran until 14 May.

Dissemination. A plan was being prepared to support the use of WG2's standards, possibly extending to all JTC 21 standards, by building a community of practitioners and a feedback mechanism on implementation challenges. The newsletter described the progress on risk management and quality management as a significant contribution by JTC 21 to implementing the AI Act.

WG3 (engineering aspects). Bias: the working draft of prEN 18283 was under consultation until 30 April. Datasets: a new working draft of prEN 18284, now titled Quality and governance of data in AI systems, was being prepared after substantial rework. Computer vision: the standard on evaluation methods for accurate computer vision systems (prEN 18281) was at public enquiry until 11 June, and the taxonomy of computer vision tasks (prEN 18288) was on its way to enquiry. Natural language processing: ISO/IEC 23281 (overview of NLP tasks) was in comment resolution after its committee draft ballot. Logging: the DIS ballot on ISO/IEC 24970 was approved with comments, to be resolved before the final draft ballot.

WG4 (foundational and societal aspects). Trustworthiness framework, Part 1: work continued on prEN 18229-1 (Logging, transparency and human oversight), and the group decided to split it in two — logging, the most advanced component, and transparency and human oversight. Part 2: prEN 18229-2 (Accuracy and robustness) was still in development. AI ethicists: the formal vote on EN 18274 (competence requirements for AI ethics professionals) was in progress. Environmental impact: EN 18287 (guidelines and metrics for the environmental impact of AI) was planned to go to public enquiry at the next plenary in October. Other continuing projects covered upskilling on AI ethics, tools for ethical issues, risk management in critical digital infrastructure, and impact assessment in the context of EU fundamental rights.

WG5 (cybersecurity). The cybersecurity standard was substantially revised after the Commission's comments. An updated version was sent to the Commission in March, with public enquiry expected in June.

Next plenary. Because several standards were about to enter public enquiry, which in practice freezes technical discussion, no plenary was planned in the near term. The next plenary was set for October 2026.

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42

The SC 42 plenary was scheduled for Singapore, 20–24 April 2026, with updates to follow.

Approved with comments. The draft technical report ISO/IEC 5259-6 (data quality visualisation); the DIS ballots on ISO/IEC 25059 (quality models for AI systems) and ISO/IEC 42105 (human oversight), with the editor's proposed resolutions for the latter available; and the committee drafts of ISO/IEC 42007 (framework for conformity assessment schemes) and ISO/IEC 42109 (human-machine teaming use cases).

Open ballots. ISO/IEC 24029-3 (statistical methods for robustness) was at DIS ballot until 27 April, ISO/IEC 25029 (AI-enhanced nudging) was at DIS enquiry, and ISO/IEC 42102 (characterising AI system methods and capabilities) was to proceed to DIS ballot.

New work. ISO/IEC 25864 (resilience assessment of AI systems) and ISO/IEC 26320 (corpus development and maintenance for NLP systems) were added to the work programme, and a committee draft consultation on ISO/IEC 42111 (guidance on lightweight AI systems) ran until 1 May.

Fora

ANEC published a factsheet on the results of its AI Task Force, funded by the European AI & Society Fund in 2025, describing how its nine members contributed at national level and in JTC 21.

Nice to know, useful to read

Civil society letter on the AI Omnibus. A group of 34 organisations and individuals, representing civil society, consumers, doctors, hospitals and healthcare services, conformity assessment bodies and academia, wrote to the Commission, the Cyprus Council Presidency and MEPs. They warned that proposals in the AI Omnibus would weaken the scope and effectiveness of the AI Act. The letter was published by BEUC.

International bodies. UNESCO joined ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42. At ITU, Study Group 17 is developing a strategy for AI security in telecommunications through a correspondence group established at its April 2025 meeting, aiming to make SG17 the lead group on AI security within ITU-T. ISO launched Standards Insider, a monthly newsletter for its technical community.

Research projects on AI harms. The PHAWM project (Participatory Harm Auditing Workbenches and Methodologies), with seven academic institutions and more than twenty partners, is developing a participatory approach to AI auditing that involves domain experts, regulators, affected people and end users, not only technical experts. It works through four use cases (health, media content, cultural heritage and collaborative content generation), building auditing "workbenches", methodologies and training, and aims to contribute to a certification framework for AI systems. The Horizon Europe project FINDHR, with AlgorithmWatch among the partners, has published free toolkits, training and guidelines on preventing algorithmic discrimination in hiring, tailored separately for software developers, HR professionals and policymakers.

My reading

This issue marks a change of phase. The programme was moving from drafting into public enquiry, and the plenary accepted that enquiry "freezes" technical debate, so the next plenary was pushed to October. The Commission's emphasis that drafts must be mature before enquiry, and that speed must not cost quality, reads as a lesson from the failed QMS enquiry reported in the previous issue. The admission that full coverage of the request is not expected before 2027 is the clearest statement yet, from inside the committee, that the harmonised standards would not be ready for the original August 2026 date.

The definition of "interested parties". The agreed wording follows the familiar ISO management system definition but explicitly adds "group". For standards meant to address fundamental rights harms, which often fall on groups, not only on individuals, that addition is not cosmetic.

The first split of prEN 18229-1. Logging was separated from transparency and human oversight because it was further ahead. This was a step towards the five-part structure the series has today.

Finally, the civil society letter on the Omnibus is a reminder that the timeline of the standards and the scope of the Act were now being negotiated at the same time, in different forums, with different people in the room.

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.