Philippe Kahn's Fullpower-AI Earns ISO 42001 Certification for Trustworthy AI
Santa Cruz legend Philippe Kahn's Fullpower-AI has earned ISO/IEC 42001:2023 certification, the global benchmark for responsible AI governance, proving that local innovation can lead on trust as well as technology.
Santa Cruz has another reason to be proud. Fullpower-AI, the sleep and biosensing company led by Philippe Kahn, has achieved ISO/IEC 42001:2023 certification. This is the world's first international management system standard for artificial intelligence.
It matters because AI is now moving into healthcare and wellness, and in those settings trust counts as much as capability. ISO 42001 covers what responsible AI requires in practice: ethical governance, risk management, data governance, transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement. It asks whether a company's AI can be relied on over time, not only whether it works.
For Fullpower-AI, the certification confirms work that has been going on for years.
Trust at Scale
The Sleeptracker-AI® platform supports hundreds of thousands of connected sleepers worldwide every night. Behind it, Fullpower's AI-powered biosensing infrastructure processes millions of hours of physiological data to produce clinically meaningful insights. The company works with Stanford Medicine and UCSF on scientific validation, and its technology reaches bedrooms around the world through a landmark 10-year global licensing agreement with Tempur Sealy International. Santa Cruz Works
At that scale, the stakes are high. The data is personal and intimate: how you breathe, how you move, and how your body recovers overnight. Fullpower's approach has been consistent throughout:
Privacy by design.
Security by design.
Responsible AI governance.
Continuous monitoring and improvement.
Scientific validation with leading research institutions.
The new certification builds on Fullpower's ISO/IEC 27001 information security certification and its earlier SOC 2 Type II attestation. Together they show a company that treats governance as core engineering work, not an afterthought. Santa Cruz Works
A Legend Who Keeps Raising the Bar
This is typical of Philippe Kahn. In a Santa Cruz delivery room on June 11th, 1997, he rigged together a camera, a phone, and a laptop to share the birth of his daughter Sophie, and ended up inventing the first camera phone. Before that, he co-founded Borland in 1983 and grew it into a $500m software company. He then built Starfish Software and LightSurf Technologies before founding Fullpower. Santa Cruz Works named him its first Titan of Tech in 2021. Portrait of a Titan: Philippe Kahn — Santa Cruz Works +2
Over four decades Kahn has repeatedly anticipated where technology was going. His current view may be his most important yet:
"The future of AI will belong not only to the most capable systems—but to the most trustworthy ones."
Many AI companies race to ship first and address governance later. Fullpower-AI has taken the opposite path, from Santa Cruz, and has now received formal international recognition for it.
Why It Matters Here
Santa Cruz County's innovation economy depends on companies that compete globally and stay rooted locally. Fullpower-AI does both. Its ISO 42001 certification tells partners, healthcare providers, and customers worldwide that responsible AI can be built here.
Congratulations to Philippe, and to Fullpower's engineering, AI, security, compliance, and quality teams, for earning this milestone.
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Portrait of a Titan: Philippe Kahn — How a camera phone built in a delivery room launched the story of SCW's first Titan of Tech.
The Cosmic Journey of Philippe Kahn — Fullpower's 10-year Tempur Sealy deal puts Sleep AI into bedrooms around the world.
Beyond Hours: Philippe Kahn, Fullpower-AI, and the New Science of Sleep Quality — Kahn argues that sleep science should measure how rested people feel, not only how long they sleep.
Fullpower®-AI Achieves SOC 2 Type II Attestation — An earlier security milestone that laid the groundwork for today's AI governance certification.
Why That Earthquake Woke You Up — Sleeptracker-AI data turns a Boulder Creek quake into an unplanned sleep science experiment.