How a safety standard gets written — six stages, years of work, one vote

Most people who work with safety standards use them as finished products — a PDF with requirements to meet, tables to reference, and formulas to apply. Very few understand the process that produces them. That process shapes what ends up in the standard, what gets left out, and how quickly the rules adapt to new technology.

Here's how an IEC International Standard gets written.

Stage 1: Proposal. A national committee or liaison organization submits a New Work Item Proposal. The proposal is circulated to all participating members of the relevant technical committee. For it to proceed, a majority of P-members must vote in favor, and at least five experts from different countries must commit to actively participate in the development work. This is the gate: if not enough countries care about the topic, it doesn't become a standard.

Stage 2: Preparatory. A working group — composed of appointed experts and led by a convenor — drafts successive Working Drafts (WDs). This is where the substantive technical content is developed. Experts iterate, debate, and revise until they've developed the best solution they can agree on. This stage alone can take one to three years for a complex safety standard.

Stage 3: Committee. The working draft becomes a Committee Draft (CD) and is circulated to all P-members and O-members (observer members) of the technical committee. National committees have 8 to 16 weeks to review and submit comments. This is the principal stage for reaching consensus — the point at which the broadest set of national perspectives shapes the document.

Stage 4: Enquiry. The revised draft becomes a Committee Draft for Vote (CDV). This is a formal ballot with a five-month voting period. For the CDV to pass, two-thirds of P-members must vote in favor, and no more than one-quarter of total votes can be negative. Negative votes must include technical justification — you can't vote no without explaining why.

Stage 5: Approval. The Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) is circulated for a two-month vote. This is an up-or-down ballot on the final text. No revision is possible at this stage — the committee accepts or rejects the standard as written. The same voting thresholds apply.

Stage 6: Publication. The standard is published as an IEC International Standard. It carries a stability date — typically five years — after which it must be reviewed and either confirmed, revised, or withdrawn. The cycle begins again.

The practical implication of this timeline: IEC 61508 was first published in 1998. Its major revision, IEC 61508:2010, was published twelve years later. Edition 3 is actively under development now, with a target publication of 2027 — the Committee Draft for Vote on Part 1 closed in May 2025. A Technical Specification for complex semiconductors (IEC TS 61508-2-1) is being fast-tracked ahead of the full revision because the committee recognized that waiting until 2027 risks the standard becoming irrelevant for modern silicon. Meanwhile, ISO 13849 was revised to its 4th edition in 2023, and ISO 13849-2 is currently at DIS ballot stage.

The decisions being made in these working groups right now — in 2025 and 2026 — define the functional safety requirements that every Physical AI system must meet through the 2030s. For anyone building in Physical AI safety: the timeline is measured in years, not quarters. If you wait until a standard is published to engage with it, you're a decade behind the people who were in the room when it was drafted.