ISO 42001 vs ISO 27001: AI governance and information security compared

ISO 42001 vs ISO 27001: the short answer

They are neighbours, not substitutes. ISO/IEC 27001:2022 sets the requirements for an information security management system (ISMS). It asks you to find the risks of information being disclosed, altered or made unavailable, and to treat them with controls. ISO/IEC 42001:2023 sets the requirements for an AI management system (AIMS) covering the responsible development, provision and use of AI systems. It asks what those systems could do to the organisation, to people and to society, and how you keep that under control.

A model can be perfectly secure and still produce unfair or harmful outcomes. It can also be well governed and still leak its training data. The first problem belongs to ISO/IEC 42001, the second to ISO/IEC 27001.

ISO/IEC 42001 and ISO/IEC 27001 side by side

Accredited ISO/IEC 27001 certification is long established. Accredited ISO/IEC 42001 certification is newer, because the certification-body requirements in ISO/IEC 42006 were published only in July 2025. Ask any body you shortlist which accreditation body has accredited it for each standard, and check that on the accreditation body's own register.

What the two standards share

Both apply the harmonised structure that ISO uses for management system standards: the same clause numbers, the same clause titles and much of the same core text. Context and scope sit in clause 4, leadership and policy in clause 5, planning in clause 6, support in clause 7, operation in clause 8, performance evaluation in clause 9 and improvement in clause 10. Both ask whether climate change is a relevant issue in clause 4.1; ISO/IEC 27001 gained that sentence by amendment in 2024, while ISO/IEC 42001 was published with it.

The risk engine also runs the same way. Each standard wants a repeatable risk assessment that produces consistent, valid and comparable results. Each then asks you to select the controls your treatment needs, compare them with its Annex A so that nothing necessary is missed, record the outcome in a Statement of Applicability with justifications, and approve a treatment plan. Each says its Annex A is not exhaustive, so controls from elsewhere can be added.

Document control, competence records, internal audit, management review and corrective action can therefore serve both certificates. How to carry an existing ISMS across is covered in ISO/IEC 27001 to ISO/IEC 42001: extending an ISMS into an AIMS; this guide does not repeat it.

Where they differ

The object of the risk

ISO/IEC 27001 identifies risks tied to information within its scope and names an owner for each. ISO/IEC 42001 identifies risks to its AI objectives and analyses consequences for the organisation, for individuals and for societies. A recruitment model disadvantaging applicants rarely appears in an ISMS risk register; in an AIMS register it must.

The impact assessment

ISO/IEC 42001 requires a separate AI system impact assessment in clause 6.1.4. It looks at what a system's deployment, intended use and foreseeable misuse could do to individuals, groups and societies. The results feed the risk assessment, and clause 8.4 repeats the assessment at planned intervals or when significant changes occur. ISO/IEC 27001 has nothing comparable. The method, with ISO/IEC 42005, is explained in AI system impact assessment, with ISO/IEC 42005.

The controls

The 93 ISO/IEC 27001 controls cover organisational, people, physical and technological security: access, cryptography, logging, backup, secure development, suppliers and incidents. The 38 ISO/IEC 42001 controls cover AI policy, roles and the reporting of concerns, resources for AI systems, impact assessment, the AI life cycle from requirements to event logs, data acquisition, quality and provenance, information for users and interested parties, responsible use, and third-party and customer responsibilities. The overlap is thin.

Approval and exclusions

In ISO/IEC 27001 the risk owners approve the treatment plan and accept residual risk; in ISO/IEC 42001 that approval comes from designated management. ISO/IEC 27001 states that excluding any requirement of clauses 4 to 10 is not acceptable when claiming conformity. ISO/IEC 42001 contains no equivalent sentence, but a certification body will still audit every clause in scope, so plan for all of them.

One AI system, two sets of questions

Take a fintech in Bengaluru that scores loan applications with a machine-learning model hosted in the cloud and trained on historical customer records.

• The ISO/IEC 27001 questions. Who can reach the training data and the model? Is the data encrypted and backed up? Are cloud and model-hosting suppliers assessed? Are logs kept and monitored, and would a breach be detected and handled?
• The ISO/IEC 42001 questions. What is the model for, and what use is out of bounds? Where did the training data come from, and was its quality checked? Could the scores disadvantage a group of applicants, and what would that mean for them? Who oversees the model's output, how are customers told it is used, and what happens when it is retrained?

Some evidence serves both: the supplier agreements, the event logs and the change records. Most does not. The access review satisfies the security auditor but says nothing about fairness; the impact assessment satisfies the AIMS auditor but says nothing about encryption.

Which one, or both? A decision table

If you also place AI systems on the EU market, neither certificate settles your legal duties; see ISO/IEC 42001 and the EU AI Act: what the certificate does not give. Whether an AIMS is worth it at all is covered in Do you need ISO/IEC 42001? A decision guide for AI providers and users.

ISO 42001 vs ISO 27001: questions buyers ask