Title: AIUC-1 readiness for UK AI agent vendors > AIUC-1 readiness for UK companies selling AI agents, from £3,500 + VAT per agent: dated gap assessment, evidence pack, crosswalks and auditor handover. Source: https://aegentra.co.uk/services/govern/aiuc-1 Publisher: Aegentra (aegentra.co.uk), United Kingdom edition. Prices in GBP excluding VAT. Published: 2026-10-30 Updated: 2026-10-30 Licence: public web content; cite the source URL. Govern / United Kingdom # AIUC-1 readiness for UK companies that sell AI agents AIUC-1 certifies a single AI agent rather than the company behind it, and the enterprise buyers a UK vendor meets at home, in the EU and in the United States have begun writing it into security questionnaires beside SOC 2 and ISO 27001. Aegentra takes your agent, its evidence and its ownership to a documented, test-ready state against the Q4 2026 release, then hands over to an AIUC-accredited auditor. We prepare; independent accredited auditors and testing bodies certify. Last reviewed 30 October 2026. Fees in pounds sterling plus VAT. [Tell us about the agent](https://aegentra.co.uk/contact?subject=AIUC-1%20readiness%20for%20UK%20companies%20that%20sell%20AI%20agents) [See the starting package](https://aegentra.co.uk/services/govern/aiuc-1#pricing) Which agent, which release, and which buyer question does it have to answer? Q4 2026 Release assessed, published 15 October 2026 50 Requirements in force across six risk categories 12 months Certificate term, with quarterly technical retesting From £3,500 + VAT Per agent, for one bounded scope Scope and fee ## A starting package priced per agent. From £3,500 + VAT per agent. Fees are quoted in pounds sterling and exclude VAT. A United Kingdom billing address adds 20% UK VAT at checkout; a billing address outside the United Kingdom pays no UK VAT. The starting package suits one agent with one clearly bounded purpose, one legal entity, core security controls already in place and an internal owner who can close agreed actions. Two agents that share a platform are quoted together after scoping. A wider or less bounded scope needs a wider quote. Aegentra is Australian-headquartered. AIUC-1 readiness is delivered remotely to companies in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, with workshops on site where agreed, and quoted in pounds sterling plus VAT. ### Included in the agreed readiness scope - A scoping workshop and a gap assessment dated to the Q4 2026 release - A map from each requirement to its control, owner, priority and evidence - Tailoring of the policies and ownership records named in the proposal - A crosswalk of the ISO 42001, SOC 2 or ISO 27001 evidence you already hold - One pre-audit readiness review and a briefing on the adversarial testing - One handover meeting with the accredited auditor you appoint ### Quoted separately or supplied by other parties - The accredited audit, the adversarial technical testing and the AIUC certificate itself - Engineering changes to the agent, its tools, connectors or guardrails - Further agents, legal entities or use cases - Support through the quarterly retesting and the 12-month certificate term - Review rounds beyond those agreed in writing Deliverables, review rounds, responsibilities, dependencies and the fixed fee are confirmed in writing before work starts. Readiness support cannot guarantee certification, a certificate date or a customer contract. [Discuss the starting package](https://aegentra.co.uk/contact?subject=AIUC-1%20readiness%20for%20UK%20companies%20that%20sell%20AI%20agents) What AIUC-1 is ## The standard, as of the Q4 2026 release. AIUC-1 is revised every quarter, so a description of it is only accurate if it says which release it describes. This one is dated to the current release and will be updated at the next. AIUC-1 is a certification standard written for one AI agent: the product a customer deploys, including its model, tools, data and guardrails. The Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company (AIUC) published it in July 2025 with contributors from Stanford, MITRE and industry. ISO/IEC 42001 certifies an organisation’s AI management system; AIUC-1 certifies a single agent, so a vendor with three agents has three certification scopes. Certification has two halves. An AIUC-accredited auditor examines governance and controls against the requirements, and an accredited testing body runs adversarial technical testing against the agent itself. AIUC’s certification committee then issues a certificate that runs for 12 months, with technical retesting every quarter. The standard is revised every quarter, with releases on 15 January, 15 April, 15 July and 15 October. This page describes the Q4 2026 release, published 15 October 2026: it added 5 requirements and 5 controls, retired 3 requirements and leaves 50 requirements in force. The Q3 2026 release of 15 July 2026 updated 8 requirements and 41 controls. A gap assessment that is not dated to a release cannot tell you what has changed since it was written, so ours always is. ### The six risk categories #### A. Data and privacy How the agent collects, keeps, discloses and trains on personal and customer data. #### B. Security Prompt injection, permissions on tools and connectors, secrets, access control and incident handling. #### C. Safety Harmful output, misuse, guardrails and independent adversarial testing. #### D. Reliability Controls on hallucination, failure modes, monitoring and fallback behaviour. #### E. Accountability Named ownership, human oversight, logging, change control and transparency to customers. #### F. Society Fairness, wider harms and obligations that reach beyond the direct customer. ### The 2026 release cycle - #### Q1 2026 **15 January 2026** Voice-agent requirements added. - #### Q2 2026 **15 April 2026** Agent protocol security and agent identity controls. - #### Q3 2026 **15 July 2026** 8 requirements and 41 controls updated. - #### Q4 2026 **15 October 2026** Release described on this page 5 requirements and 5 controls added; 3 requirements retired. Open-weight model controls and stronger third-party testing. - #### Q1 2027 **15 January 2027** Next scheduled release. Primary references [AIUC-1: the standard](https://standard.aiuc-1.com/) [AIUC-1: changelog and release notes](https://standard.aiuc-1.com/changelog/) [AIUC: accredited auditors](https://www.aiuc-1.com/accredited-auditors) Counts are as AIUC publishes them in the changelog and the Q4 2026 release note, read 30 October 2026. Re-read the primary pages at each release. Who is being asked ## Who is being asked for AIUC-1 in the UK. No UK law names AIUC-1, and the UK’s principles-based approach to AI regulation does not require it. The demand is commercial: it arrives through procurement and security questionnaires, and it arrives from the buyer, not the regulator. UK companies that sell an AI agent to enterprise customers in the UK, the EU and the United States are meeting the question in vendor security questionnaires and procurement checklists, next to SOC 2 and ISO 27001. What the buyer wants to know is whether someone independent has examined the agent’s controls and tried to break it, not whether the vendor has an AI policy on its intranet. For a vendor selling into the EU, the EU AI Act is the regulatory backdrop. AIUC publishes a crosswalk from AIUC-1 to the EU AI Act, which is useful for mapping evidence once rather than twice. This page makes no claim that AIUC-1 certification satisfies any legal obligation in the UK or the EU; that is a question for your legal advisers. The second driver arrived on 19 October 2026, when the AICPA and AIUC announced a joint offering that pairs a SOC 2 report with AIUC-1 certification in a single CPA-led engagement. The CPA firm performs the SOC 2 and AIUC-1 engagement and issues the report; AIUC or an accredited technical evaluation body performs the quarterly technical testing. It is being piloted at several CPA firms, with full launch planned for early 2027. A UK vendor that already holds SOC 2 for its US customers has the shortest route, and our SOC 2 readiness and AIUC-1 readiness are scoped to fit it. ### Where you are starting from - #### No certification yet Begin with the agent boundary and the exact wording of the buyer’s question. Readiness builds the governance evidence and the agent-level controls in one pass; if the buyer also wants SOC 2, the joint AICPA and AIUC route covers both in one engagement. - #### We hold SOC 2 Your Trust Services Criteria controls already answer much of the organisational side. Readiness concentrates on the agent-specific requirements and the adversarial testing, scoped so that your CPA firm can run the joint SOC 2 plus AIUC-1 engagement. - #### We hold ISO 42001 Your AI management system supplies most of the governance evidence. AIUC-1 adds agent-level controls and mandatory third-party testing that ISO 42001 does not require, so readiness maps your AIMS records to the requirements and closes what remains. - #### We hold both You are closest to the finish. Readiness is a dated gap assessment against the current release, the agent-specific evidence, test preparation and handover: weeks rather than months for a bounded agent. AIUC-1 versus ISO 42001 ## Two standards, one agent, different questions. AIUC publishes an official crosswalk to ISO 42001 and a reverse mapping from ISO 42001 controls to AIUC-1 requirements, and states that AIUC-1 incorporates most ISO 42001 controls and adds third-party testing. The two are complementary; the table shows where they part. | | AIUC-1 | ISO/IEC 42001:2023 | | --- | --- | --- | | What is certified | One AI agent: its model, tools, data and guardrails | The organisation’s AI management system (AIMS) | | Who certifies | AIUC’s certification committee, on the reports of an accredited auditor and an accredited testing body | An accredited certification body | | Technical testing | Mandatory adversarial testing of the agent, repeated every quarter | Not required by the standard | | Structure | 50 requirements in six risk categories, each with controls beneath it | Clauses 4 to 10 plus 38 Annex A reference controls | | Change cadence | Quarterly releases | Edition-based; first edition 2023 | | Term | 12 months, with quarterly retesting | Three-year cycle with annual surveillance | | Who asks for it | Enterprise buyers of AI agents in the UK, the EU and the United States | Procurement, regulators and boards governing AI use | | What carries over | AIMS governance evidence covers much of the accountability and data categories | An AIUC-1 evidence pack supplies agent-level operating evidence for the AIMS | AIUC also publishes crosswalks to the NIST AI RMF, the EU AI Act, OWASP, MITRE ATLAS and SOC 2. If you hold ISO 42001, or are building towards it, the crosswalk is where readiness begins. What Aegentra does ## Readiness, from the current release to the auditor’s opening meeting. Five pieces of work, each with a named owner and a written scope. Together they take an agent from an unassessed state to one an accredited auditor can examine without discovering the gaps on your behalf. - ### Gap assessment against the current release We take the agent, its tooling and the organisation around it through every requirement of the Q4 2026 release and record the result line by line, dated to that release. The output is a prioritised list with owners, not a percentage score. - ### Policies and ownership AIUC-1 expects named accountability: who owns the agent, who approves a change, who answers when something goes wrong. We draft or adapt the policies, procedures and ownership records the requirements call for, inside the document system you already use. - ### Evidence pack Every requirement gets a control, an owner and proof of what actually happens: logs, access reviews, test records, change approvals and data-handling records, assembled in the order an auditor will sample them. - ### Crosswalk to what you already hold Where you hold ISO 42001, SOC 2, ISO 27001 or a NIST AI RMF profile, we map that evidence onto the AIUC-1 requirements through AIUC’s published crosswalks, so nothing is built twice and the gaps that remain are real. - ### Test readiness and auditor handover We prepare the agent and the team for the adversarial technical testing an accredited body will run, then pass the readiness outputs to the accredited auditor you appoint and attend the opening meeting where the scope includes it. What Aegentra does not do ## Aegentra prepares. Independent accredited third parties certify. Aegentra does not certify against AIUC-1, does not audit for AIUC, does not run the accredited adversarial testing and holds no AIUC accreditation. Only AIUC accredits auditors, and only AIUC issues certificates. You appoint the accredited auditor; we work to their information requests and hand over the readiness outputs. The firms in the register below are the accredited auditors AIUC lists, as read on 30 October 2026. They are independent third parties with no relationship to Aegentra. Accreditation is earned through a witness audit, so firms marked provisional are completing that step. Check AIUC’s own register before appointing one, because the list changes. ### AIUC-accredited auditors | Firm | Status | Accreditation period from | Note | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Schellman | Fully accredited | 1 November 2025 | First accredited AIUC-1 auditor; audited the first AIUC-1 certification, UiPath. | | Coalfire | Provisional | 1 May 2026 | — | | A-LIGN | Provisional | 1 August 2026 | — | | BDO | Provisional | Not stated on the register | — | | Grant Thornton | Provisional | Not stated on the register | — | | Mastermind | Provisional | Not stated on the register | — | | Sensiba | Provisional | Not stated on the register | — | Register as published by AIUC, read 30 October 2026. Aegentra has no relationship with any firm listed and receives nothing from an appointment. ### Who does what, from readiness to certificate - **Readiness** #### Aegentra Gap assessment, policies and ownership, evidence pack, crosswalk and handover. - **Controls** #### Your organisation Owns and operates the agent and its controls, and closes the agreed actions. - **Audit** Independent of Aegentra #### AIUC-accredited auditor Examines governance and controls against the requirements and reports to AIUC. - **Testing** Independent of Aegentra #### Accredited testing body Runs the adversarial technical testing, then the quarterly retests. - **Certificate** Independent of Aegentra #### AIUC certification committee Issues the certificate for 12 months. - **Decision** #### Your customer Decides whether the certificate answers the question in its questionnaire. How the engagement runs ## Four named steps, then the auditor takes over. The engagement is sized in weeks, not months, for a bounded agent with existing security controls. Audit and testing dates belong to the auditor and the testing body, not to us. For a bounded agent with core security controls already operating, readiness is usually a matter of weeks. The audit and the adversarial testing are scheduled by the auditor and the testing body, and we do not promise a certificate date before those dependencies are known. - ### Scope the agent AIUC-1 certifies an agent, so the first task is the boundary: which product, which model, which tools and connectors, which data, which guardrails and which buyer question it must answer. The written scope names the accountable lead and records responsibilities, assumptions and exclusions. One agent, one scope; a shared platform is recorded once and referenced. - The buyer’s exact wording decides whether the joint SOC 2 plus AIUC-1 route is the right one. - ### Assess against the release We walk the agent and the organisation through each requirement of the Q4 2026 release and its controls, reuse the evidence you already hold through the published crosswalks, and record a dated gap list with an owner and a priority on every line. Evidence from ISO 42001, SOC 2 or ISO 27001 is mapped, never rebuilt. - Dating the assessment to the release makes the next quarterly change a delta rather than a restart. - ### Build and evidence Policies, ownership records and procedures are written or adapted inside your own systems. Your team operates the controls; we organise the evidence in the order an auditor samples it and prepare the agent and the people around it for adversarial testing. Engineering changes to the agent belong to your team or to a separately scoped Aegentra service. - Test readiness means knowing what the testing body will attempt and holding the logs that show what happened. - ### Hand over We pass the readiness outputs to the auditor you appoint and attend the opening meeting where the scope includes it. The auditor examines, the testing body tests and AIUC’s certification committee decides. None of that is Aegentra’s to promise. Quarterly retesting and the 12-month renewal are scoped separately if you want support through them. - Findings are represented as they are; fixing a problem does not change how it is reported. Before you commission the work ## Your questions. Clear answers. **What is AIUC-1, and who issues the certificate?** AIUC-1 is a certification standard for one specific AI agent, published by the Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company in July 2025 and revised every quarter. Its requirements sit in six risk categories: data and privacy, security, safety, reliability, accountability and society. An AIUC-accredited auditor examines governance and controls, an accredited testing body runs adversarial testing against the agent, and AIUC’s certification committee issues the certificate, which lasts 12 months with quarterly retesting. The Q4 2026 release, published 15 October 2026, has 50 requirements in force. **Does Aegentra certify, audit or test against AIUC-1?** No. Aegentra provides readiness only. We do not certify, do not audit for AIUC, do not run the accredited adversarial testing and hold no AIUC accreditation. You appoint an accredited auditor from AIUC’s own register, which names independent firms with no connection to Aegentra; we hand over the readiness outputs and attend the opening meeting where the scope includes it. **What does AIUC-1 readiness cost in the UK?** Aegentra’s starting package is from £3,500 + VAT per agent for the bounded scope described on this page, fixed in writing after a scoping call and quoted in pounds sterling plus VAT. The accredited audit, the adversarial technical testing, the certificate and any engineering changes to the agent are separate costs, charged by other parties or quoted separately. **What counts as one agent?** AIUC-1 certifies an agent, not a company. Each distinct agent, with its own purpose, model, tools and data boundary, is its own scope and its own certificate. Two agents built on one platform are quoted together after scoping, because much of their evidence is shared; a product that is really three agents under one name is three scopes. **How long does readiness take for a UK vendor?** It depends on how tightly the agent is bounded, what evidence already exists and which release is in force. For a bounded agent with core security controls already operating, readiness is usually a matter of weeks rather than months. The audit and the adversarial testing are scheduled by the accredited auditor and the testing body, so we never promise a certificate date. **We already hold ISO 42001 or SOC 2. What carries over?** Most of the governance evidence, once its scope has been checked against the agent. AIUC publishes crosswalks to ISO 42001, SOC 2 and the NIST AI RMF, and we map your existing evidence through them rather than rebuilding it. AIUC-1 then adds agent-specific controls and mandatory adversarial testing that neither standard supplies. A SOC 2 holder can also use the joint SOC 2 plus AIUC-1 engagement the AICPA and AIUC announced on 19 October 2026. **Which release do you assess against, and what happens at the next quarterly change?** The release named on this page, currently Q4 2026, published 15 October 2026. AIUC-1 changes every quarter, on 15 January, 15 April, 15 July and 15 October, and the next scheduled release is Q1 2027 on 15 January 2027. Because the gap assessment is dated to a release and the handover notes which requirements changed since, a new release is a delta to work through rather than a fresh start. **Do UK companies need AIUC-1?** No UK law requires it, and the UK’s principles-based approach to AI regulation does not name it. Demand comes from enterprise buyers in the UK, the EU and the United States writing it into procurement and security questionnaires. If your agent sells to those buyers, readiness costs less before the questionnaire lands than after a deal stalls on it. If it does not, ISO 42001 may be the better first step, and we will tell you so. Choose the right route ## Connected work. Distinct responsibilities. Commission the management system behind the agent, prepare for the report your US customers ask for, or train your own team. ### Related services [ISO 42001 implementation](https://aegentra.co.uk/services/govern/iso-42001) [SOC 2 readiness](https://aegentra.co.uk/services/govern/soc-2) [Internal audit services](https://aegentra.co.uk/services/internal-audit) ### Develop your knowledge [PECB ISO 42001 Lead Implementer course and exam](https://aegentra.co.uk/academy/iso-42001-lead-implementer) [ISO 42001 certification in the UK](https://aegentra.co.uk/knowledge/iso-42001-certification-uk) ## Tell us about the agent. Describe what the agent does, who buys it, what the buyer has asked for and which certifications you already hold. We reply with the right scope and what we need for a written proposal. [Tell us about the agent](https://aegentra.co.uk/contact?subject=AIUC-1%20readiness%20for%20UK%20companies%20that%20sell%20AI%20agents)