Navigating ISO 27001: A Practical Guide to Intellectual Property for AI Companies

Introduction: Why Your AI’s Greatest Asset is Also Its Biggest IP Risk

For any innovative AI company, your intellectual property (IP) is your most valuable asset. It is the core of your competitive advantage, embodied in your proprietary algorithms, unique training datasets, and sophisticated models. While this IP drives your company’s value, it also creates a landscape of unique and complex compliance challenges, particularly under globally recognised frameworks like ISO 27001. This guide is designed to demystify ISO 27001 Annex A 5.32 Intellectual property rights, explaining its specific relevance to your AI workflows and providing a clear, actionable path to robust compliance. We will analyse the amplified IP risks inherent in AI development and demonstrate how to build a defensible, audit-ready programme to protect your creations.

This process begins with a clear understanding of what the standard actually requires.

Demystifying Control 5.32: What ISO 27001 Actually Requires for Intellectual Property

To build a compliant programme, you must first understand the precise requirements of ISO 27001 Annex A control 5.32. This control is not about abstract legal theory; it is about implementing practical, documented procedures to safeguard your intellectual property and respect the IP of others. Getting this right is a strategic imperative that protects you from legal risks and builds trust with customers and partners.

The Control in Plain English

The primary purpose of control 5.32 is to ensure your organisation complies with all legal, statutory, regulatory, and contractual requirements related to intellectual property rights. The standard itself is direct and unambiguous, stating that: “The organisation should implement appropriate procedures to protect intellectual property rights.” This means moving beyond good intentions to establish a systematic, evidence-based approach to managing IP across your entire business.

What Counts as Intellectual Property?

Under this control, intellectual property is a broad category that includes the many “creations of the mind” that your business produces and consumes. To an auditor, this means you need to identify and manage a range of specific IP types, including:

• Patents
• Trademarks and trademark rights
• Design rights
• Source code licences
• Software copyright
• Document copyright

While this control applies to all organisations, its application creates unique and significant challenges for businesses working at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence.

The AI Amplification: Unique IP Risks in Your Workflows

Standard IP management processes are often insufficient for the dynamic and data-intensive nature of an AI company. Your everyday workflows, from model training to inference, amplify traditional IP risks in ways that demand a more rigorous approach. Here, we analyse the specific, high-stakes vulnerabilities you face across your core operations.

Sensitive Training Datasets

The datasets you use to train your models are a foundational component of your IP, but they are also a significant source of risk. Using improperly sourced or licenced data, whether textual, audio, or visual, can lead to severe copyright infringement claims. Such an oversight does not just create a legal liability; it can compromise the legal standing and commercial viability of the entire model built upon that data, creating a critical vulnerability at the heart of your product.

Proprietary Algorithms and Models

Your core IP – the algorithms, source code, and trained models – are the very definition of trade secrets and creations of the mind. These assets require robust protection to prevent unauthorised use, theft, or reverse-engineering. Without strong controls, such as strict access management and clear policies defining acceptable use, this invaluable IP is exposed to both internal and external threats, undermining your entire business model.

The AI Supply Chain

Modern AI development rarely happens in a vacuum. Your workflows likely rely on a complex supply chain of third-party IP, including open-source libraries, pre-trained models from public domains, and third-party datasets. Each component comes with its own set of terms, conditions, and fair use guidelines. Failure to meticulously track and comply with these licences can result in significant legal and financial consequences, disrupting your operations and damaging your reputation.

Managing these amplified risks requires a systematic and documented approach, turning ad-hoc practices into a structured, defensible compliance programme.

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Your Blueprint for Compliance: Actionable Steps for Protecting AI Assets

Achieving compliance with control 5.32 is not a theoretical exercise but a series of concrete, practical actions. By taking a structured approach, your AI business can build an IP management programme that is not only audit-ready but also a genuine business enabler. This section provides a clear blueprint you can follow to protect your most critical assets.

Foundational Policies and Procedures

The cornerstone of compliance is a formal, topic-specific policy for the protection of intellectual property rights. This policy must be clearly written, officially approved, and communicated to all employees and relevant stakeholders. It is crucial that everyone understands their responsibilities regarding the company’s IP and the IP of others. This policy should be supported by documented procedures that define how software and data products must be operated to remain compliant with all legal and contractual obligations.

The AI Asset Register

You cannot protect what you do not track. A critical step is to maintain a comprehensive asset register that identifies all ICT assets with associated IP requirements. For an AI company, this must include not only commercial software but also proprietary datasets, trained models, and critical source code. For every asset listed, your organisation must be able to provide clear proof of ownership or valid licensing on demand.

Systematic Reviews and Controls

Compliance is an ongoing activity, not a one-time project. You must implement a series of systematic controls and reviews to ensure your IP programme remains effective. Key activities include:

• Periodic Reviews: Conduct regular checks to ensure no unlicensed or unauthorised software, datasets, and third-party models are being used across the organisation. These reviews must also verify that the use of licenced assets does not exceed purchased limits and that you remain compliant with the licensing terms of open-source dependencies in your models.
• Secure Disposal: Establish and follow compliant practices for the transfer and disposal of software assets. This includes the secure deletion of proprietary models and datasets when they are deprecated to prevent IP leakage and ensure their removal respects all licensing terms.
• Trusted Sourcing: Implement a rule that all software must be acquired from reputable and trusted sources. This simple control helps avoid inadvertent copyright breaches that can occur with software from unverified channels.
• Employee Awareness: Provide regular training and awareness activities for all employees. Everyone in your organisation must understand the importance of IP protection and their specific role in upholding the company’s policies.

Building all of these components from the ground up can be a daunting and time-consuming task, which is why a structured starting point is essential.

The Solution: Building an Audit-Ready Programme with the High Table Toolkit

The challenges of implementing control 5.32 for an AI company are significant, but they are not insurmountable. The solution lies in adopting a structured, proven framework that provides the necessary tools without forcing you to start from a blank page. The hightable.io ISO 27001 Templates Toolkit is specifically designed to help companies like yours efficiently and effectively meet these requirements and build a professional, audit-ready programme.

From Theory to Practice, Instantly

The High Table toolkit provides the essential governance structure and documentation needed to satisfy an auditor. It moves you beyond theory and spreadsheet chaos by delivering a pre-written, topic-specific policy on intellectual property, along with templates for the essential asset register and operational procedures discussed previously. This register is structured to track not only software licences but also the provenance of your sensitive training datasets and the licensing of open-source libraries embedded in your proprietary models, directly addressing the core IP risks unique to AI development. This allows your team to focus on tailoring the framework to your unique AI workflows, rather than spending countless hours inventing compliance documents from scratch.

Why a Toolkit is the Right Foundation for Your AI Company

Using a template toolkit gives your company full ownership and control over your compliance documentation – the core evidence an auditor needs to see. This approach provides a robust, proven foundation that you can adapt to the specific nuances of your algorithms, datasets, and models. Unlike other solutions, a toolkit empowers you to build a system that is yours to manage and evolve, without the complexity or recurring costs of alternative approaches.

A Practical Licensing Checklist

To help you get started, the toolkit provides practical guidance. The checklist below, adapted from High Table’s resources, offers a simple framework for verifying common IP assets in your environment.

Item to Check	Why?	Evidence Required
Paid Software	Prevent Piracy fines.	Invoice + License Key.
Open Source	License Compliance (GPL/MIT).	Library Inventory (SBOM).
Fonts / Images	Copyright Infringement.	Stock Photo Receipt.
Freeware	“Free for Personal Use” trap.	EULA Review (Commercial Use check).

By providing this clear structure and these actionable tools, the toolkit empowers you to transform a complex compliance requirement into a manageable, documented process. This systematic approach is the foundation for turning IP compliance from a burden into a true competitive advantage.

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Conclusion: Turning IP Compliance into Your Competitive Edge

For an AI company, managing intellectual property is far more than a compliance task – it is a strategic necessity. Your ability to innovate, compete, and grow depends directly on your ability to protect your most valuable creations. By understanding the unique IP risks amplified by AI workflows and implementing a structured, systematic programme, you can build a resilient and defensible position. Using proven resources like the High Table ISO 27001 Templates Toolkit, you can transform this challenge into an advantage, protecting your assets, confidently passing audits, and building enduring trust with the customers and partners who are vital to your success.

About the author

Stuart Barker is a veteran practitioner with over 30 years of experience in systems security and risk management.

Holding an MSc in Software and Systems Security, Stuart combines academic rigor with extensive operational experience. His background includes over a decade leading Data Governance for General Electric (GE) across Europe, as well as founding and exiting a successful cyber security consultancy.

As a qualified ISO 27001 Lead Auditor and Lead Implementer, Stuart possesses distinct insight into the specific evidence standards required by certification bodies. He has successfully guided hundreds of organizations – from high-growth technology startups to enterprise financial institutions – through the audit lifecycle.

His toolkits represents the distillation of that field experience into a standardised framework. They move beyond theoretical compliance, providing a pragmatic, auditor-verified methodology designed to satisfy ISO/IEC 27001:2022 while minimising operational friction.