For Heads-of · Practitioner

AI system lifecycle controls gap

AI systems lack defined lifecycle controls, so changes ship without a consistent governance checkpoint from requirements through decommissioning.

  • medium
  • governance
  • lifecycle
  • change-control

How it happens

A model or prompt gets updated, retrained, or replaced through the normal software deployment pipeline, with no AI-specific gate checking that the change was validated, documented, and approved the way the original system was.

Why it matters

Governance that only applies at initial launch decays quickly: most of an AI system's risk exposure over its life comes from changes made after the day-one review, not from the day-one state itself.

Mitigating controls

The controls that address this risk, ranked by effectiveness.

Framework and clause references

FrameworkClauseTitle
ISO/IEC 42001:2023Annex A.6AI system life cycle

Related resources

The external sources behind this risk, from the Resources library.