ISO/IEC DIS 42102, read from the public preview

The document in brief

The draft sets out a shared way to describe what an AI system does and how it does it. It calls the two sides of that description methods and capabilities, and it arranges them as a matrix.

The stated audience is every organisation involved at any life cycle stage of an AI system, and every stakeholder role. The stated purpose is a common understanding of a system among people who would otherwise describe it in different vocabularies.

The document is descriptive. It sets no management system requirements, no control objectives and no conformity test. Its use is voluntary unless a contract, a regulator or a management system adopts it.

What the public preview carries

The Online Browsing Platform publishes the foreword, the introduction, the scope, the normative references, the seven terms in clause 3 and the bibliography. The table of contents names seven clauses and their subclauses. That is the material this record is built from, together with the catalogue record and the national body project pages that carry the dates.

What it withholds

The bodies of clauses 4 to 7 are not in the public preview, and neither are the annex titles or their text. The introduction says informative annexes explain and illustrate how the framework is applied, but it does not name them. This site does not invent an Annex A, does not guess the descriptor wording and does not reproduce the paid text.

Why a descriptive standard still matters

A descriptive framework does not create a duty, but it can become the template a procurer, an assessor and a supplier all use. When that happens, the description becomes part of what an organisation has asserted about a system. The work is to make those assertions explicit, evidenced and revisable, so a change in a model or a method does not silently invalidate them.

The key date and its basis

ISO records stage 40.60, close of voting, with an effective date of 8 September 2026 on the national member body project pages. The next stages are approval, publication and national adoption by member bodies, whose timing varies. The date on this site is a planning estimate of 330 days from the scout date of 21 October 2026, not a date ISO has published.

Stage record

Where it sits in the family

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42 publishes this framework beside the AI management system standard (42001), the risk management guidance (23894), the impact assessment standard (42005), the AI concepts and terminology standard (22989), the machine learning framework (23053) and the transparency taxonomy (12792).

No prior edition

No amendment is recorded for this project. It is Edition 1, so there is no prior edition to diff against. The revision check is therefore a first edition check: what the draft adds to the vocabulary a firm already uses.