ISO and IAF (still going by that name, for some reason) just published a new ISO 9001 Auditing Practices Group guidance document that was written be exactly zero subject matter experts.
The new publication, released on May 29, 2026, is called “Auditing a Quality Management System that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems,” and provides guidance for auditors of ISO 9001. One of the authors, Joana dos Guimarães Sá, recently put up a post on LinkedIn which revealed just who wrote the document.
That was certainly convenient because it gave us a way to check the qualifications of the authors. Which I did.
AI Means “Faking Your Resume”
First, though, see this bit in the document, which has a lot to say about the qualifications of people auditing companies that might use AI for ISO 9001:
That’s six specific requirements. Now, I dug into each of the author’s profiles to see if any of them had any experience in any of those things. To keep this article short, the answer is (predictably), “of course not.”
- Joana dos Guimarães Sá – Portugal – Management system consultant, no AI experience.
- Sheronda Jeffries – USA – Management system consultant, AB representative, no AI experience.
- Pavel Castka – Czech Republic – Professor, former university dean, no AI experience.
- Monica Gutierrez – Mexico – Quality researcher for Mexican University, no AI experience.
- Rui Pacheco – Portugal – Consultant, internal auditor for Siemens, no AI experience.
- Ramon Francisco Manresa Rene – Spain – Engineer for Airbus, no AI experience.
- Leopold Luz – Brazil – Family law attorney, no AI experience.
- Herick Lopez – USA – Certification body exec, no AI experience.
- Denise Robitaille – USA – QMS consultant, no AI experience.
- Valentin Dzedik – Russia – University vice-chancellor, CB auditor, no AI experience.
(Yes, ISO still has Russians writing its documents.)
Copyright Cops
There is one other interesting snippet that is worth pointing out in this otherwise worthless document. Once again, ISO is pushing for an instantaneous, worldwide deputization of every CB auditor to act as their unpaid, volunteer “copyright cops.” I wrote previously they are doing this by using the IAF to force this requirement on CB auditors, and the fact that the copyright for this APG document is listed as joint copyright between IAF and ISO should be proof enough that they are joint conspirators in this illegal fraud.
Look at this:
And:
Now, keep in mind that nobody follows the APG guidance documents anyway, so this won’t have much practical effect. It’s just more evidence of ISO’s intent.
But given its druthers, ISO would have ISO 9001 auditors now demanding “evidence” that your AI system or tool does not include its own standards. Which means every single commercial AI tool you could ever use would fail this test. All of them — all of them! — have absorbed the text of ISO 9001. I mean ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft CoPilot, (Facebook’s) Meta AI, Grok, Claude, Deepseek, etc. Not a single one will report an error if you ask them to tell you the requirements of a given ISO 9001 clause, meaning they have all been trained on the “copyrighted” text.
Want to build your own AI tool but use available large language models? Good luck finding out the “data lineage” of the LLM’s training date, which is nearly always not made available to you. You will not be able to assure it wasn’t built on ISO’s copyrighted text.
So if auditors follow this APG guide, every ISO 9001 certified company in the world that ever used an AI tool would instantly fail their audit. This is because ISOI does not vet the “experts” it tasks with writing stuff, it just assesses their willingness to bend over backwards for ISO’s sales and marketing.
Next, ISO isn’t really worried about any of this if there is money to be had. Anthropic was sued for millions due to copyright theft in order to populate its Claud AI engine, and was promptly awarded ISO 42001 certification by Schellman, attesting to how Anthropic verified data lineage of its model. Which it didn’t. Got it?
Now, perhaps if someone on the APG team knew the least bit about AI, LLMs, training methods, etc., they might not have embarrassed themselves and put that bit in. Although it’s likely ISO would have forced them to, anyway, since this is really about ISO selling standards, and not really about improving auditing practices.
In case you missed it, I wrote about how this business of auditing copyright is illegal, here.
Christopher Paris is the founder and VP Operations of Oxebridge. He has over 35 years’ experience implementing ISO 9001 and AS9100 systems, and helps establish certification and accreditation bodies with the ISO 17000 series. He is a vocal advocate for the development and use of standards from the point of view of actual users. He is the writer and artist of THE AUDITOR comic strip, and is currently writing the DR. CUBA pulp novel series. Visit www.drcuba.world
