This excerpt was originally published as part of a full article on the SRES website.

Introduction

ISO/IEC TS 22440, Artificial intelligence — Functional safety and AI systems, is an emerging standard intended to address the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in safety-related systems. It is currently in Committee Draft and is not expected to be released until early to mid-2027. The final content may change, but the current draft provides a useful indication of how functional safety principles are being adapted for AI-enabled systems.

Unlike ISO/PAS 8800, which is specific to the automotive industry, ISO/IEC TS 22440 is agnostic to industry. It addresses AI within a safety-related control system, AI used in support of safety-related control systems, and AI-based software tools used during safety-related development.

Why Can’t We Just Apply Functional Safety to Develop Physical AI Systems?

The short answer is: we do. However, it is very important to understand the specific differences in how AI, or rather machine learning, algorithms are developed compared to traditional software development. Standards like ISO/IEC 5338 (AI system life cycle processes) use software lifecycle processes, such as ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207, as the framework within which AI characteristics are built. Similarly, in the Physical AI safety space, we need to integrate these unique properties within the framework of functional safety. Addressing this is exactly what drives the need for a standard like ISO/IEC TS 22440.

We could talk about the differences between using explicit rules versus learning from statistical patterns in data. While that is all true, I want to point out two of many key differences that we really need to pay attention to.

First, having a proper data lifecycle is absolutely essential when promoting the safety of AI-enabled systems. In the functional safety world that many of us grew up in, this simply wasn’t the case.