OPAQUE has joined two Linux Foundation initiatives—the Appia Foundation and the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF)—to help develop open standards for AI identity, runtime governance, and verifiable AI systems. The move reinforces the industry's growing focus on creating transparent and independently verifiable frameworks for governing autonomous AI applications.
The company plans to contribute its expertise in AI identity, cryptographic verification, and runtime policy enforcement to support the next generation of trusted enterprise AI infrastructure.
OPAQUE has announced its membership in the Appia Foundation and the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), two Linux Foundation initiatives focused on building trusted AI infrastructure and governance standards.
According to the company, its participation will center on advancing open specifications for AI identity, policy enforcement, runtime governance, and cryptographic evidence that organizations can use to independently verify AI system behavior.
The announcement follows the Confidential Computing Summit, co-hosted by OPAQUE and the Linux Foundation, where industry participants emphasized the need for verifiable governance as AI systems become increasingly autonomous.
As enterprise AI adoption accelerates, regulatory expectations and governance requirements continue to evolve. OPAQUE says organizations increasingly need mechanisms that allow them to prove how AI systems operate rather than relying solely on provider assurances.
The Appia Foundation focuses on developing testing criteria, evaluation guidelines, and component standards for assessing trusted AI systems, while the Agentic AI Foundation provides an open governance framework supporting transparent development of autonomous AI agents.
OPAQUE's contributions are intended to strengthen both initiatives through technologies that enable independently verifiable AI execution using hardware-based security.
"AI is becoming part of the world's critical infrastructure, and critical infrastructure can't run on trust alone, it needs proof," said Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of OPAQUE. "The challenge of obtaining that proof shows up concretely today: enterprises buying AI have no standardized way to verify how a model or agent actually behaved short of trusting the hyperscaler's word for it, and no way to run models independently of the handful of providers currently gatekeeping access to them. That's why we're putting our work on agent identity and runtime governance into the open, through the Appia Foundation and Agentic AI Foundation. We're giving enterprises, regulators, and auditors the ability to independently verify how AI systems behave."
OPAQUE's proposed standards are built upon its open-source Agent Governance Toolkit (AGT), which has attracted nearly 5,000 GitHub stars and contributions from more than 100 developers.
The company plans to contribute several emerging specifications, including:
According to OPAQUE, these specifications are being developed collaboratively with industry partners before transitioning into vendor-neutral community standards.
"Verifiable trust in AI cannot be something any one company owns. It has to be an open standard the whole industry can build on and independently check. I created the Agent Governance Toolkit to give teams a common language for what an agent is allowed to do, and Agent Manifest, TRACE, Confidential MCP, and cA2A extend that from written policy into cryptographic proof. Bringing this work into the Appia Foundation and Agentic AI Foundation is exactly where it belongs: a neutral home where enterprises, regulators, hardware makers, and model providers shape it together. I've been contributing to both communities, and joining as a member is our commitment to build this in the open, with everyone, not around anyone," said Imran Siddique, Chief Platform Officer, OPAQUE.
OPAQUE says the initiative builds on the release of OPAQUE 3.0 and its ongoing work within the Confidential Computing Consortium.
By contributing governance technologies to Linux Foundation initiatives, the company aims to support industry-wide standards that enable enterprises to verify AI identity, runtime behavior, policy enforcement, and autonomous agent interactions across increasingly complex AI environments.
The Agent Governance Toolkit, Agent Manifest, TRACE, Confidential MCP, and Confidential A2A are currently available as open-source projects.
OPAQUE is the Confidential AI company. Born from UC Berkeley's RISELab (now the Sky Compute Lab), OPAQUE lets organizations run AI models, agents, and workflows on their most sensitive data with hardware-rooted isolation and verifiable evidence that approved governance policies were actually enforced. Founded by Dr. Ion Stoica (co-founder of Databricks; co-director, UC Berkeley Sky Compute Lab), Dr. Raluca Ada Popa (ACM Grace Hopper Award winner; Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, where she leads AGI security research), and Rishabh Poddar (CTO); Imran Siddique, creator of the open-source Agent Governance Toolkit (AGT), is Chief Platform Officer. OPAQUE created the Confidential Computing Summit, now co-hosted with the Linux Foundation.
