If you are building an AI company, you know that the threat landscape moves faster than a model training run on an H100 cluster. Yesterday, prompt injection was a theoretical risk; today, it’s a script kiddie tool. In this environment, trying to secure your organization in isolation is a guaranteed way to fail.
This is where ISO 27001 Annex A 5.6: Contact with Special Interest Groups comes in. For traditional businesses, this control is often a “tick-box” exercise of joining a generic security forum. For AI companies, it is a strategic necessity. It is your early warning system for model vulnerabilities, adversarial attacks, and emerging safety standards.
Here is how to implement Annex A 5.6 specifically for an AI-driven organization, satisfying the auditor while actually making your models safer.
Table of contents
What is Annex A 5.6 Asking For?
The standard requires you to “establish and maintain contact with special interest groups.”
In the context of AI, this doesn’t mean just joining a local chamber of commerce. It means plugging your security and engineering teams into the communities where the bleeding edge of AI security is discussed. It is about creating a flow of intelligence from the outside world into your dev loops.
The Difference Between “Authorities” and “Groups” (A 5.5 vs A 5.6)
Before we dive in, let’s clear up a common confusion.
- Annex A 5.5 (Authorities): These are the people who can fine you or shut you down (e.g., The Information Commissioner’s Office, the future EU AI Act regulators).
- Annex A 5.6 (Special Interest Groups): These are the people who can help you (e.g., The AI Safety Institute, OWASP LLM Group, research forums).
For this guide, we are focusing on the “helpers.”
Step 1: Identify “AI-Relevant” Groups
A generic cybersecurity newsletter won’t tell you about a new jailbreak technique for Llama-3. You need niche intelligence. Your Special Interest Group (SIG) register should include a mix of the following:
1. AI Security Research Communities
The best intel often comes from the researchers breaking the models. Consider following:
- OWASP Top 10 for LLMs: The gold standard for understanding vulnerabilities like prompt injection and model theft.
- Hugging Face Security Discussions: If you use open-source models, you need to be plugged into the community discussions regarding model provenance and scanning.
- arXiv Feeds: Yes, a preprint server counts. Monitoring arXiv for new papers on “Adversarial Machine Learning” is a legitimate way to stay ahead of threats.
2. Industry Alliances
Join groups that are setting the standards before they become laws.
- The AI Safety Institute (US/UK): Engaging with their publications shows you are aligning with national safety standards.
- Partnership on AI (PAI): Good for broader ethical and safety discussions.
3. Vendor-Specific Forums
If your entire stack is on AWS Bedrock or OpenAI Enterprise, you need to be on their specific security notification lists. These are the “Special Interest Groups” that will tell you if your API keys are at risk.
Step 2: Assign Ownership (Don’t let the intel die)
In an AI startup, everyone is busy. If you just sign up for a newsletter, nobody will read it. You need to map specific groups to specific roles.
Example Mapping:
- Head of Engineering: Owns the OWASP LLM updates (to update the system prompts).
- CISO / Security Lead: Owns the AI Safety Institute updates (to update governance policies).
- DevOps Lead: Owns the Cloud Provider security bulletins.
Step 3: Creating the “Feedback Loop”
To pass the audit, you need to prove that you didn’t just read the news—you acted on it. This is vital for AI companies because the remediation often involves code changes or retraining.
The Evidence Chain:
- Input: “We received a notification from the OWASP group about a new ‘indirect prompt injection’ vector.”
- Processing: “We discussed this in the Tuesday Engineering Sync (see minutes).”
- Output: “We updated our sanitization middleware to strip these characters. (See Pull Request #402).”
If you can show an auditor this chain, you will pass with flying colors.
Step 4: Documenting Compliance
You need a register. It’s a simple document that lists who you talk to and why.
The register should track:
- Group Name
- Category (e.g., Research, Vendor, Gov)
- Key Contact / URL
- Internal Owner
- Frequency of Review
If you want to save time, Hightable.io provides ISO 27001 toolkits that include a specialized “Special Interest Group Register” template. Using a pre-built template ensures you capture the “Relevance” field, which is often where auditors catch you out (i.e., “Why are you a member of a physical security forum when you are a fully remote AI company?”).
DO IT YOURSELF
STOP SPANKING £10,000s on CONSULTANTS and ISMS ONLINE PLATFORMS
Common Pitfalls for AI Companies
1. “Twitter is my SIG”
We know that “AI Twitter” (or X) is where news breaks. But telling an auditor “I saw a tweet” is weak evidence. If you use social media for intel, formalize it. Create a “Threat Intel” channel in Slack where these tweets are posted and discussed. That Slack channel becomes your audit evidence.
2. Ignoring “Model Supply Chain” Groups
If you download weights from Hugging Face or GitHub, you are part of a supply chain. You need to be monitoring the security discussions of the model creators. If the model you use is found to have a backdoor, how will you know? Being part of that model’s community is your control.
Conclusion
For AI companies, ISO 27001 Annex A 5.6 is more than compliance; it is a competitive advantage. It ensures your product is hardened against the attacks that your competitors haven’t even heard of yet.
Start by identifying the 3-5 groups that actually matter to your tech stack, assign an owner to each, and document your actions. If you need help structuring this, the resources at Hightable.io can get you audit-ready in minutes.
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.
