ISO/IEC 42001:2023 (AI Management System) — Attestix coverage

ISO/IEC 42001:2023 — Information technology — Artificial intelligence — Management system — is the first international management-system standard specifically for AI. Published in December 2023, it defines how organisations establish, implement, maintain, and continually improve an AI management system (AIMS). This page shows how Attestix's signed audit chains, Verifiable Credentials, and provenance records map to ISO/IEC 42001's Annex A controls and process clauses.

Why this matters

ISO/IEC 42001 is a management-system standard, not a product-conformance standard. Like ISO/IEC 27001 (information security), conformance is awarded to an organisation by an accredited certification body after a defined audit programme. Attestix does not issue ISO 42001 certifications and is not a certification body. What Attestix ships is the cryptographic evidence layer an AIMS owner can use during audit preparation — particularly for the Annex A controls that touch the AI lifecycle (data, model, deployment, monitoring) where signed audit trails reduce manual evidence-gathering by weeks.

The honest coverage table

The table below covers 14 representative rows spanning 28 of the 38 Annex A controls plus the AIMS process clauses (Clauses 4–10). The complete control inventory and ratings are in the internal mapping doc.

Tally

• full: 0 (no control is fully satisfied by a tool — ISO 42001 is a management-system standard; no tool is an AIMS)
• strong-partial: 6 (data, lifecycle, impact assessment, transparency, deployer use, resources — the technical lifecycle clusters)
• partial: 3 (planning/support/operation, internal organization, third-party)
• record-only: 5 (context/leadership, policies, environment, objectives + processes)
• out-of-scope: 0 (every control family has at least record-only Attestix surface)

Important caveat — security_check_id ships in v0.5.0. As of Attestix v0.4.0 the underlying events listed above are emitted today, but they are NOT yet tagged with the iso42001.* discriminator. The v0.5.0 release registers the prefix in the FRAMEWORK_REGISTRY closed set; per-control emission tagging is incremental. Until then you can already query the underlying events by action and reconstruct the same coverage manually.

What we don't do

• We do not author your AI policy. A.2 policy controls expect the AIMS owner's documented policy. We record a signed fingerprint that the policy exists; we never write it.
• We do not measure environmental impact. A.5.6 expects the operator's energy + resource disclosure. Tools like CodeCarbon and ML CO2 measure; we sign the measurements.
• We do not assess substantive content of impact assessments. Per the v0.5 anti-compliance-theater design, when a deployer asserts a FRIA section is complete + appropriate, the result transitions to assertion_recorded (rendered blue), NOT to passed=true (rendered green). Attestix never claims to have verified the substance of a human assertion.
• We are not your Statement of Applicability (SoA) authoring tool. The SoA is an AIMS-owner artefact. We offer a bundle export --controls iso42001 flag (v0.5) so the AIMS owner can include Attestix evidence in their SoA; we do not author the SoA.
• We do not run third-party audits. ISO 42001 certification is awarded by accredited certification bodies (ANAB-, UKAS-, JAS-ANZ-accredited). We provide audit-ready evidence; the audit + certification are separate organisational journeys.

How to verify our coverage yourself

Python / CLI

# List every audit event tagged with an ISO 42001 control (v0.5.0+)
attestix audit list --security-check iso42001.A_7_4.data_quality_attestation_recorded

# Export a bundle scoped to ISO 42001 evidence for your SoA (v0.5.0+)
attestix bundle export --controls iso42001 --out my-aims-evidence.atxbundle

# Verify chain integrity for an agent's audit log (today)
attestix verify-chain <agent-did>

JavaScript / browser

npm install attestix

import { verifyCredential } from "attestix";

const result = await verifyCredential(impactAssessmentCredentialJson);
// result.valid === true if the Ed25519 signature over the JCS-canonical body
// matches the issuer DID's public key.

On-chain anchor (Base L2 Sepolia testnet)

attestix anchor audit-batch --agent <did> --network base-sepolia

Mainnet schema registration is planned; testnet is the default target today.

Comparable disclosure

How other tools position themselves on ISO 42001 alignment. We name approaches found through public documentation; we do not disparage.

See also

• OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications mapping
• NIST AI RMF 1.0 mapping
• SOC 2 Trust Services Criteria mapping
• FRIA template (EU AI Act Art 27)
• EU AI Act compliance guide
• Offline verification walkthrough
• The internal mapping spec at attestix-cloud-plan/23-ISO-42001-MAPPING.md — engineering-grade detail.

Attestix is evidence tooling for organisations operating an ISO/IEC 42001 AIMS. Attestix is not an AI Management System, is not an ISO 42001 certification body, and a passing tag against an Annex A control ID is one signal in the organisation's overall conformity posture — not a conformance verdict. The organisation's AIMS owner + the accredited certification body remain the authoritative voices.