Standards aren't written by governments. They're written by committees you can join.

There's a common misconception that safety standards come from governments. They don't. Standards like IEC 61508, ISO 13849, and ISO 10218 are developed by technical committees composed of experts — engineers, researchers, and industry representatives — delegated by their national standards bodies.

Three organizations matter most for Physical AI safety.

The IEC — International Electrotechnical Commission — is the home of functional safety. Technical Committee 65, Subcommittee 65A maintains IEC 61508, the parent standard for all electrical, electronic, and programmable electronic safety-related systems. The IEC has 228 technical committees and subcommittees, with over 20,000 experts drawn from 92 National Committees representing more than 170 countries. Every safety integrity level, every diagnostic coverage calculation, every hardware fault tolerance requirement that governs how safety-critical systems are built traces back to the work of this committee.

ISO — the International Organization for Standardization — develops the machinery and robot-specific safety standards. Technical Committee 299 is responsible for robot safety: ISO 10218 for industrial robots (revised in 2025 with major updates including integration of ISO/TS 15066 for collaborative applications and new cybersecurity requirements), and related specifications. TC 199 maintains ISO 13849, the machinery safety standard that most robot OEMs currently certify against. ISO has 169 member countries and has published over 25,000 standards.

IEEE — the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers — brings the AI and autonomous systems perspective. The IEEE Standards Association develops the P7000 series on ethics of autonomous and intelligent systems, and P2817 on robot safety verification. Unlike IEC and ISO, IEEE is open to individual participation — you don't need to go through a national committee to join a working group.

The voting mechanism matters. In IEC and ISO, individual experts don't vote. Your country's national standards body — SII in Israel, ANSI in the US, DIN in Germany, BSI in the UK — appoints experts to technical committees. Those experts represent the country's position. If your country's delegation to TC 65 or TC 299 doesn't include someone who understands Physical AI — nobody speaks for that perspective in the room where the rules are being written.

The timeline is long. A new IEC standard goes through six stages: proposal, preparatory (working drafts), committee draft, enquiry, approval, and publication. A complex safety standard can take 3 to 10 years from first proposal to publication. IEC 61508 was first published in 1998 and its major revision came in 2010 — twelve years. The next revision is being shaped now. The decisions in today's working groups define the safety rules for 2035.

If you're building Physical AI and you're not in any standards room, you're ceding the field to incumbents who have been there for decades. The rooms are open. The seats are not all taken.