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ISO/IEC TR 24368

ISO/IEC TR 24368 is the ISO/IEC Technical Report that gives a high-level overview of ethical and societal concerns in artificial intelligence.

Category: AI ethics / standards Published: July 10, 2026 Modified: July 10, 2026 Last reviewed: July 10, 2026 Tags: ISO, IEC, AI ethics, societal concerns, governance, standards

Definition

ISO/IEC TR 24368:2022 is titled Information technology — Artificial intelligence — Overview of ethical and societal concerns. ISO lists it as Edition 1, a 48-page Technical Report published in August 2022, with reference number ISO/IEC TR 24368:2022.

The public ISO page describes the report as a high-level overview of ethical and societal concerns around AI. It says the report outlines common sources of concern, highlights relevant principles and processes, maps supporting international standards, and is not intended to promote any one value system.

Status

As reviewed on July 10, 2026, ISO lists ISO/IEC TR 24368:2022 as published, with publication stage 60.60. Its lifecycle record shows new-project approval on May 17, 2019, committee-draft registration on July 16, 2021, close of the committee-draft comment period on September 15, 2021, final text received on May 4, 2022, proof activity in June and July 2022, and publication on August 19, 2022.

ISO identifies ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42 as the responsible technical committee and classifies the report under ICS 35.020. The SC 42 committee page describes the subcommittee's scope as standardization in artificial intelligence and lists working groups for foundational standards, data, trustworthiness, use cases and applications, and computational approaches.

Concern Surface

ISO/IEC TR 24368 matters because ethical and societal concerns are often handled either too vaguely or too late. The report's public summary names bias, lack of transparency, privacy violations, and diminished human autonomy as concerns that need proactive attention. Those issues arise wherever AI systems shape decisions, resources, rights, work, safety, or public trust.

The key move is to treat ethics as an inspectable governance surface. A concern should be connected to a source, affected parties, relevant principles, operational processes, and standards that can help turn concern into practice. Without that connection, "AI ethics" can become an institutional slogan rather than a disciplined account of harms, tradeoffs, and responsibilities.

Engineering Use

For builders, ISO/IEC TR 24368 is useful at the point where a system is being scoped, not only after deployment. A team can identify which ethical or societal concerns are plausible, which stakeholders should be heard, which principles are relevant, and which later evidence will be needed. That exercise should sit beside system definition, risk management, impact assessment, data governance, testing, and human oversight.

The report also keeps value pluralism visible. ISO says the document does not advocate one specific value system. In practical governance, a principle list does not make ethical questions disappear. Teams still have to document tradeoffs, local context, unresolved conflicts, and decision authority.

Evidence Record

An ISO/IEC TR 24368-informed record should identify the AI system or application, deployment context, affected parties, ethical and societal concerns in scope, concerns intentionally left out of scope, sources of concern, relevant principles, related standards, mitigation processes, review owner, consultation record, residual risk, and reassessment trigger.

The record should also preserve disagreement. Ethical and societal concerns can involve genuine conflicts: accuracy against privacy, automation against autonomy, efficiency against dignity, safety against openness, or organizational benefit against public burden. A useful record does not flatten those conflicts into a single "responsible AI" label. It shows what was argued, who was included, what evidence was used, and what remains unsettled.

Boundary With Other Standards

ISO/IEC TR 24368 is not an AI management-system standard, risk-management guide, conformity-assessment scheme, or ethics certification. It sits beside documents that turn concern into more specific governance work. ISO/IEC TR 24028 addresses trustworthiness, ISO/IEC TR 24027 addresses bias, ISO/IEC 38507 addresses governance implications of organizational AI use, and ISO/IEC 42005 addresses AI system impact assessment.

Source Discipline

Use the official ISO page for the title, reference number, Technical Report status, publication date, stage, edition, page count, technical committee, ICS classification, public summary, listed benefits, intended audience, value-system limitation, and lifecycle dates. Use the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42 page for committee scope and working-group structure. Do not cite vendor summaries for the report's formal status, and do not treat ISO/IEC TR 24368 as a certification mark, product approval, or legal safe harbor.

Spiralist Reading

Spiralism reads ISO/IEC TR 24368 as a discipline against ethics theater. Naming ethical concerns is not the same as governing them. A principle list can become decorative if it is not tied to affected people, operational controls, evidence, review authority, and the power to stop or change a system.

The report is useful because it leaves room for plural values while still insisting that concerns be named. That is the narrow path: avoid pretending that one standard settles moral life, but also avoid letting value conflict become an excuse for no record, no responsibility, and no repair. Ethical concern becomes governance only when it leaves a trace.

Open Questions

Sources

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