A customer's security questionnaire asks whether you hold ISO/IEC 42001 certification, and nobody in the company has heard of it. You're not alone in that, and the honest answer for most companies of 20 to 1,000 people is "not yet, and here's why". The surprising part is how little of the work is about AI models. The standard audits whether you run AI the way you say you do: a written scope, a list of what's in use, risk and impact assessments, owners and dated reviews. Your AI vendors' own certificates don't do that for you.
What is ISO 42001?
ISO/IEC 42001:2023 is an international standard that specifies the requirements for an AI management system (AIMS): the policies, objectives, processes and records an organization uses to develop, provide or use AI responsibly, which an accredited certification body can audit and certify.
Microsoft's summary of the standard defines an AI management system as "a set of interrelated or interacting elements of an organization intended to establish policies and objectives, and processes to achieve those objectives, in relation to the responsible development, provision, or use of AI systems." The word "use" matters. The standard is "designed for entities providing or utilizing AI-based products or services", so a company that only buys ChatGPT seats and switches on Copilot is in scope if it chooses to be.
UKAS, the UK's accreditation body, calls it "the world's first management system standard for artificial intelligence." It's a management system standard in the same family as ISO 9001 for quality and ISO/IEC 27001 for information security. That means it doesn't prescribe a technology. Google's compliance page puts it plainly: "The 42001 standard does not mandate specific AI controls". It sets out a framework and a checklist of controls that each organization applies to its own risks.
This guide is for the COOs, IT and security leads and operations leads who get the questionnaire. It covers what the standard asks for, whether you need the certificate, what certification costs and takes, and what your vendors' certificates cover. It isn't legal advice. If you're still choosing a framework, start with our comparison of AI governance frameworks.
What's in the standard
The standard follows the same high-level structure as other ISO management system standards. The requirements an auditor checks sit in clauses 4 to 10:
| Clause | Title | What it asks of a company that uses AI |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | Context of the organization | Which AI is in scope, your role (provider or user) and who cares about it |
| 5 | Leadership | An AI policy, signed off by leadership, with roles assigned |
| 6 | Planning | AI risk assessment, risk treatment and AI system impact assessment |
| 7 | Support | Resources, staff competence, awareness and documented records |
| 8 | Operation | Running the assessments and controls you planned, in practice |
| 9 | Performance evaluation | Monitoring, an internal audit and management review |
| 10 | Improvement | Fixing what the reviews find, and recording it |
Behind the clauses sit four annexes. According to Advisera's summary of the standard, Annex A "Lists 38 controls organized into nine sections", Annex B gives guidance on implementing each one, Annex C lists AI objectives and risk sources, and Annex D covers use across sectors. ISO's own site refused automated access, so we couldn't check the standard's text directly; buy the standard before you scope an audit.
You don't have to apply every Annex A control. Your risk and impact assessments decide which ones apply, and a document called the Statement of Applicability records which you chose and why. Schellman, an accredited certification body, lists it among the documents reviewed in the first audit.
Is ISO 42001 mandatory?
No: ISO/IEC 42001 is a voluntary standard, and no US law requires a private company to be certified against it. ISO describes itself, in Microsoft's summary, as "the world's largest developer of voluntary international standards."
It becomes a requirement in one way: a customer writes it into a contract, a tender or a vendor questionnaire. Schellman reports that "Certain industries, like financial services, are beginning to incorporate ISO 42001 requirements into vendor security questionnaires." BSI, another certification body, says "26% of organizations report taking steps to align with ISO/IEC 42001." Aligning isn't certifying, but it's the direction customers are moving.
Do you need ISO 42001 certification?
You need ISO/IEC 42001 certification when a customer requires the certificate itself; until then, build the same habits with a free framework and keep the records an audit would ask for. That makes it a commercial decision, not a legal one.
| Your situation | What to do |
|---|---|
| A customer contract or tender requires the certificate | Plan for certification and budget for the three-year cycle below |
| Questionnaires ask about it, but accept other evidence | Answer with your AI policy, AI list and a NIST AI RMF profile; revisit in six months |
| You sell AI features inside your own product | Certification is a stronger signal for you than for a company that only uses AI; price it out |
| Nobody has asked | Build the habits, not the certificate. Follow the NIST AI RMF and keep dated records |
The records are the point. A certification audit checks what you've done over time: the internal audit, the management review, the assessments behind each approved tool. A company that already keeps those records can certify in months. A company that starts when the contract arrives is starting from zero.
What do your vendors' ISO 42001 certificates cover?
Your vendors' certificates cover their own AI management systems, not yours; they're evidence you can use in your vendor reviews, and nothing more. Most of the platforms a mid-size company runs are certified:
| Vendor | What's certified, as the vendor states it | Where to get the certificate |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft | Microsoft Copilot, Copilot Chat, Copilot Studio, GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Foundry, Security Copilot and others | Service Trust Portal |
| Google Cloud, Google Workspace and the Gemini app | Request it as Google Cloud's compliance page explains | |
| AWS | The services listed on its certificate, audited by Schellman | AWS Artifact |
| Anthropic | Its AI management system, certified by Schellman in January 2025 | Ask Anthropic, or start from its announcement |
AWS is the bluntest about the limit: "Your organization is not automatically certified by association." Microsoft says the same thing in more words. You can use its certificate "in your compliance assessment", but "You're responsible, however, for engaging an assessor to evaluate the controls and processes within your own organization and your implementation".
That split is useful, not just a caveat. When you approve a tool, ask for its ISO/IEC 42001 certificate and scope and file them with the approval. That's evidence for your supplier controls. What no vendor certificate covers is the part that goes wrong in most companies: which staff use which tools, what data goes in, who checks the output, and who switches a tool off.
How does ISO 42001 certification work?
Certification is a two-stage audit by an accredited certification body, followed by a certificate valid for three years with a surveillance audit every year. Schellman, which certified AWS's and Anthropic's AI management systems, describes the cycle this way:
- Stage 1 "typically lasts 1-2 days" and is mostly a document review: your scope, required policies, risk and impact assessment methods and the Statement of Applicability.
- The gap between the stages "is typically 4-12 weeks" and "should not exceed more than six months", or Stage 1 may have to be repeated.
- Stage 2 "can last anywhere between 3-9+ days" and checks that your policies and controls work in practice, including your internal audit, management review and corrective actions.
- The certificate "is valid for a three-year period, with annual surveillance audits", each taking about a third of the time of the first audit, or 2 to 5 or more days.
Schellman adds that "ISO 42001 requires that you perform an internal audit of the AIMS each year." So before Stage 2, you need at least one full internal audit and one management review on record.
Choose an accredited certification body
Anyone can sell an "ISO 42001 certificate". What makes one credible is accreditation of the certification body by a national accreditation body. UKAS says accreditation "confirms that a certification body has the competence, impartiality and consistent approach" to certify against the standard. In the US, that's the ANSI National Accreditation Board (ANAB). BSI got its ANAB accreditation for ISO/IEC 42001 on March 10, 2026, and Schellman is ANAB-accredited too. Before you sign, ask the body for its accreditation certificate and check that ISO/IEC 42001 appears on its scope.
How much does ISO 42001 certification cost?
Published figures put the audit fees between about $6,000 for a very small company and the $40,000s in the first year, with annual surveillance audits after that; your own staff time to build the system comes on top. Few certification bodies publish prices, so treat these as ranges to test against quotes:
| Item | Published figure | Who says so |
|---|---|---|
| First-year audit (Stage 1 and Stage 2) | "from the $20,000's up to the $40,000's" | Schellman, an accredited certification body |
| Surveillance audits, years two and three | "$13,000 to $20,000+ annually" | Schellman |
| Certification for a very small company | "start from US$6,000" in Western Europe and North America | Advisera, a consultancy (secondary) |
| The standard itself | Sold by ISO and national standards bodies | Check the price when you buy |
Schellman says only that "The cost varies based on complexity." In practice that's the scope: how many AI systems, sites and staff the audit covers. A narrow scope (one product, or the company's use of three approved tools) costs less than "all AI across the company".
What the published figures leave out is internal time. Someone has to write the policy, run the impact assessments, do the internal audit and hold the management review, and then keep doing it every year. If you hire a consultant to build the system, that's a separate bill. Our guide to AI consulting costs has published rates for that kind of work.
What is the difference between ISO 42001 and ISO 27001?
ISO/IEC 27001 governs information security and ISO/IEC 42001 governs how you develop, provide or use AI; they share the same structure, so a company with ISO 27001 can reuse much of its management system and add the AI-specific parts. Advisera notes that "Both standards have very similar structures according to the high-level structure (HLS)", and that main clauses and almost all subclauses are the same.
| ISO/IEC 27001 | ISO/IEC 42001 | |
|---|---|---|
| Governs | Information security | Developing, providing or using AI |
| Structure | Clauses 4 to 10 | Clauses 4 to 10, the same headings |
| Risk work | Information security risk assessment | Adds an AI system impact assessment and your role (provider or user) |
| Controls | Its own Annex A | A different Annex A, plus implementation guidance in Annex B |
Advisera's view is that combining the two is possible "Up to a point": policy, document control, internal audit and management review can be shared, while the risk assessment, risk treatment and AI controls mainly stay separate. If you already hold ISO 27001, ask your certification body whether it can audit both together.
How does ISO 42001 compare with the NIST AI RMF?
The NIST AI RMF is free US guidance with no certificate; ISO/IEC 42001 is a paid international standard you can be certified against, and the two cover much of the same ground. NIST lists a crosswalk between them, contributed by Microsoft, on its resource center. Our NIST AI RMF guide covers that framework and gives a profile template.
For a company of 200 people, the sensible order is usually NIST first, because it's free and asks for the same habits, then ISO/IEC 42001 when a customer wants an auditor's certificate. Work done for one carries over: your AI list, impact assessments, owners and review records are evidence for both.
An auditor checks the habits, not the binder
Many companies prepare for ISO/IEC 42001 by writing a stack of policies the month before Stage 1. Stage 2 then asks the question the binder can't answer: show me it happening. Show the impact assessment for the tool you approved in June. Show the internal audit. Show who reviewed the AI list, and when.
That's what our framework is built to produce as a side effect of running AI well. Its guardrails give you an AI list and approved tools, the starting point for clause 4's scope and the supplier controls. Its "own" step puts an owner and a backup on every tool, review dates in the calendar and three standing meetings, which is most of what clauses 5, 9 and 10 ask an auditor to see. If you're deploying AI across the company now, keep the records as you go, and the audit becomes a review of work you've already done.
How do you prepare for ISO 42001 certification?
01 · Find out what the customer actually asked for
Read the clause or questionnaire line. "Aligned with ISO 42001" and "certified to ISO/IEC 42001 by an accredited body" are different asks with different costs. The answer sets whether you need the rest of these steps now.
02 · Make the AI list
List every AI tool and AI feature in use, including the AI built into software you already pay for. You can't set a scope without it. The Shadow AI Audit builds a first version in about five minutes.
03 · Set the scope and your role
Decide what the management system covers: the whole company's use of AI, or one product or team. Record whether you're a provider of AI, a user of it, or both. A narrow, honest scope is cheaper to audit and easier to keep.
04 · Write the policy and run the assessments
Write the AI policy (our AI usage policy generator gives you a starting draft), then run a risk assessment and an impact assessment for each AI use in scope. Choose your Annex A controls from the results and record them in the Statement of Applicability. File each vendor's ISO/IEC 42001 certificate with its approval.
05 · Run it, then audit yourself
Operate the system for a few months: approvals, reviews, incidents, fixes, all dated. Then run a full internal audit and a management review, and fix what they find. This is the record Stage 2 checks.
06 · Get quotes from accredited bodies and book Stage 1
Ask two or three accredited certification bodies for a quote against your written scope, and check each one's accreditation covers ISO/IEC 42001. Book Stage 1 when the internal audit is done, and leave 4 to 12 weeks before Stage 2. If you want help getting there, our AI governance work starts with steps 2 to 4.
What's still open
- How fast customer demand grows. Questionnaire requests are rising in some industries, but there's no public count of how often mid-size suppliers are asked for the certificate rather than for alignment.
- Prices. Few certification bodies publish fees, and the figures above come from one accredited body and one consultancy. Quotes will vary with scope.
- Revisions. ISO reviews its standards periodically. We couldn't reach iso.org to check the standard's current review status.
We'll update this article when a revision of ISO/IEC 42001 is announced or when more certification bodies publish their fees. The date at the top of the page shows when we last checked.
Sources
- UKAS grants first AIMS accreditation, UKAS, January 2026: the description of ISO/IEC 42001 as the first AI management system standard, the first UK accreditation of a certification body (BSI) on January 15, 2026, and what accreditation confirms. iso.org refused automated access, so we relied on this and the pages below.
- BSI secures ANAB accreditation to certify ISO/IEC 42001, BSI, March 2026: BSI's ANAB accreditation on March 10, 2026, and the figure of 26% of organizations taking steps to align.
- ISO/IEC 42001:2023 Artificial Intelligence Management System Standards, Microsoft Learn, updated September 2026: the standard's description and AIMS definition, the voluntary status of ISO standards, Microsoft's certified services, and its statement on what customers must still do.
- ISO/IEC 42001 compliance, Google Cloud, checked November 2026: Google's certified products and the note that the standard doesn't mandate specific AI controls.
- ISO/IEC 42001 FAQs, Amazon Web Services, checked November 2026: AWS's certification body, where to get the certificate, and that customers aren't certified by association.
- Anthropic achieves ISO 42001 certification for responsible AI, Anthropic, January 2025: Anthropic's accredited certification and its certification body.
- What to Expect in the ISO 42001 Certification Process, Schellman, updated June 2026: the length and content of the Stage 1 and Stage 2 audits, the gap between them, the three-year certificate and surveillance audits.
- From Advisory to Audit: A Step-by-Step Guide to ISO 42001 Certification, Schellman, updated June 2026: the annual internal audit requirement and ISO 42001 in financial services questionnaires.
- ISO 42001: Frequently Asked Questions, Schellman, updated June 2026: Schellman's first-year and surveillance audit price ranges.
- ISO 42001 Requirements: Clauses and Structure, Advisera, checked November 2026 (secondary): the clause titles and the summary of Annexes A to D.
- Big guide to ISO 42001 certification, Advisera, checked November 2026 (secondary): the starting price for very small companies.
- ISO 42001 vs. ISO 27001: Similarities and differences, Advisera, checked November 2026 (secondary): the shared structure, what ISO 42001 adds, and how far the two can be combined.
- Crosswalks to the NIST AI RMF, NIST Trustworthy and Responsible AI Resource Center, checked November 2026: the ISO/IEC 42001 crosswalk contributed by Microsoft.