Socio-Legal Discussion Group: The Inter- and Intra-Institutional Politics of AI Standards-Making

Technical standards are a mechanism for translating high-level aims into implementable practices. However, far from being “neutral” technical documents, it has long been recognised that standards, and the processes to create them, are political. In this article, we analyse the politics of standards making for artificial intelligence (AI). Drawing on fifty semi-structured interviews with standards-makers and experts, we assess the political dynamics between AI standards-making institutions and within the two most important AI standards committees: ISO/IEC JTC1/SC42 and CEN-CENELEC JTC21. We find that there are a multitude of institutions developing technical standards for AI and that competition between them is facilitating low adoption rates and “forum shopping”. Within this landscape, the robust procedures of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC42 and CEN-CENELEC JTC21 leave them relatively insulated from interstate geopolitics, but these same procedures create uneven participation. Notably, they simultaneously lead to too much and not enough “Big Tech” influence. From these findings, we introduce the concept of “insulated ineffectiveness” to describe how the robust processes of technocratic institutions can undermine their practical authority in environments with low institutional switching costs.