On 24 October 2024 the European Commission published a brief addressing the upcoming harmonised standards for the AI Act. The harmonised standards are intended to define concrete approaches that can be adopted to meet the requirements in the AI Act in practice, and will confer providers of high-risk AI systems with a presumption of conformity with the relevant legal obligations. The drafting of the standards is currently underway, however, progress has been slower than anticipated.
The upcoming standards are expected to display certain characteristics, where the European Commission has requested that the standards cover 10 concrete aspects of AI. These are:
- Risk management
- Data governance and quality
- Record keeping
- Transparency
- Human oversight
- Accuracy
- Robustness
- Cybersecurity
- Quality management
- Conformity assessment
The harmonised standards are intended to be published well before August 2026 (when the obligations for high-risk AI systems become applicable), to ensure that providers have sufficient time to prepare.
