Two standards, one architecture: FprEN ISO/IEC FDIS 24970 and prEN 18229-1
Two significant milestones landed this spring serving both the state of the art and Article 12 of the EU AI Act.
FprEN ISO/IEC FDIS 24970, the international standard on AI system logging, just reached FDIS stage. prEN 18229-1, its European counterpart under JTC 21, reached Enquiry stage. Neither event will generate headlines. Together, they represent something important about how AI Act compliance actually works.
Note that neither standard is finalised at this point.
The division of labour
If you have read the earlier article on the international standards hidden inside the AI Act harmonised standards, you will know that the CEN-CENELEC harmonised standards programme does not operate in isolation. The technical foundations are being built at the international level, through ISO/IEC SC 42. The European harmonised standards reference that international work, position it within the regulatory framework, and provide the Annex Z mapping that creates a presumption of conformity under the AI Act.
This division is deliberate. It reflects the Vienna Agreement, the cooperation framework between ISO and CEN that has been in operation since 1991. Under the Vienna Agreement, parallel development at both levels is avoided. When the technical community is already aligned around a problem, ISO takes the lead. CEN works alongside it or builds on top of it. The result is a two-layer architecture: international technical specification at the ISO level, European regulatory positioning at the CEN level.
ISO/IEC 24970 and prEN 18229-1 are the clearest examples of this architecture in the current AI Act standards programme.
