SOC 2 for AI
Companies

Because enterprise buyers gate AI procurement on it. When a large organisation adopts an AI product, its security and legal teams need independent assurance that customer data is protected inside your models and pipeline. A SOC 2 Type II report provides that assurance, replacing a lengthy AI security review with a document their team can rely on. For most AI startups selling to enterprises, SOC 2 is the single fastest way to unblock the security stage of a deal.

Yes — it is the central question. SOC 2 tests the controls around how training, fine-tuning, and inference data are accessed, encrypted, segregated, and retained. The report should make clear whether customer data trains shared models, and evidence the tenant isolation and retention limits that keep one customer’s data out of another’s outputs. We design these data-handling controls to be explicit and testable, because it is exactly what enterprise reviewers scrutinise.

SOC 2 is an attestation of your security control environment — how you protect data, systems, and availability. ISO 42001 is a certification of your AI Management System — how you govern AI risk, bias, transparency, and lifecycle. They answer different buyer questions and are increasingly requested together. The good news is that much of the SOC 2 control work forms the foundation an ISO 42001 system builds on, so we map the overlap and help you sequence both without duplicating effort.

Security (the Common Criteria) is mandatory. For AI companies we almost always add Confidentiality, because customer prompts and datasets are confidential, and Availability, because inference platforms carry uptime SLAs. Processing Integrity becomes relevant where deterministic correctness matters — scoring or data-transformation pipelines — and Privacy where you process personal data at scale. We scope criteria to what your enterprise contracts actually demand rather than over-scoping.

Plan on 10–16 weeks of consulting work: Type I in 10–12 weeks, Type II in 14–16 weeks plus a 3–12 month observation window. TCSA’s consulting fee is ₹2–4 Lakh (indicative until a scoping call), covering scoping, gap assessment, control design across your ML pipeline, policy drafting, evidence preparation, and audit coordination. The CPA firm’s attestation fee is billed separately and varies with scope.

Yes, and running on a major cloud usually makes it easier because those providers already hold their own SOC reports. You inherit their infrastructure controls and focus on application- and pipeline-level controls — data access, model change management, logging, encryption. We document the complementary user-entity controls and carve out the subservice organisations, including any third-party model APIs and vector databases, so the shared-responsibility boundary is explicit and the auditor finds no gaps.