OPAQUE, AMD, Intel, TII, and Other Industry Leaders Collaborate on TRACE, an Open Standard to Advance Runtime Verification for AI

New vendor-neutral specification creates portable, hardware-backed evidence of what AI
systems ran, which policies were enforced, and how sensitive data was governed across clouds
and infrastructure 

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 25, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- OPAQUE, the Confidential AI company, today announced TRACE (Trust, Runtime Attestation, and Compliance Evidence), an open, portable, hardware-enforced governance record for AI agents and other confidential workloads. Developed in collaboration with leading hardware and AI infrastructure companies and contributed to the Linux Foundation, TRACE establishes a vendor-neutral format for proving what software ran, which policies governed execution, what data classifications were involved and which tools were invoked. Rather than creating another proprietary verification stack, TRACE composes existing standards into a common evidence layer designed to work across enterprise, cloud and sovereign AI infrastructure.

Enterprise AI is rapidly moving from isolated model experiments to agents and workloads that operate across sensitive data, tools, clouds and infrastructure. That shift is making the need for independently verifiable runtime evidence more urgent. OpenAI recently disclosed that models undergoing a cybersecurity evaluation, with certain production safeguards intentionally reduced for testing, found an unexpected path beyond their constrained environment and compromised Hugging Face infrastructure. The incident underscored a fundamental challenge for autonomous AI: documented policies and sandbox configurations do not, by themselves, prove which controls remained in force or what a system actually did during execution.

The same evidence gap applies to open-weight models. Possessing the weights and controlling the infrastructure provides greater deployment control, but it does not prove that an approved model ran unmodified or that required policies governed its use. That's where TRACE comes in. Vendors across the AI ecosystem are developing their own approaches to runtime attestation and evidence, but without an open standard, enterprises face a vendor-by-vendor patchwork of incompatible trust records that cannot be independently compared or verified.

TRACE composes established standards for hardware attestation, workload identity, software provenance and transparency, including RATS, EAT, SLSA, SCITT, SPIFFE and EAR. The result is a single verifiable artifact that travels with AI workloads across cloud providers, confidential computing platforms and sovereign infrastructure while adding runtime evidence for policy enforcement, data classification and AI tool execution.

"The models and agents we deploy five years from now will be far more powerful than the ones we're deploying today. We may not always be able to predict how they reason, but we can control what they're allowed to do and prove what they actually did," said Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of OPAQUE. "TRACE creates a tamper-evident record of what ran, which policies were enforced, what data was involved and which tools an agent invoked. That proof holds whether you're running an open-weight model today or a much more capable system tomorrow. The industry needs that evidence to be portable and independently verifiable before the market hardens around incompatible vendor trust systems."

"As enterprises move AI into production on their most sensitive data, confidentiality cannot be an afterthought, it has to be a requirement," said Mahesh Wagh, senior fellow at AMD. "AMD SEV provides that built-in silicon foundation, keeping data and models protected in use, and TRACE turns that protection into portable, independently verifiable evidence. We're proud to be a founding collaborator on an open standard that gives organizations independent evidence of not just where their AI ran, but how it behaved once in production."

"The industry must move to cryptographically-verifiable AI. As agents become more autonomous and increasingly interact with other agents, sensitive data, and critical business systems, organizations need cryptographic evidence of the agent's identity, what it is authorized to do, where it is running, and proof that governance policies were enforced. Hardware-based attestation and confidential computing make that possible at scale, creating a foundation for independently verifiable AI where enterprises can make informed decisions before agents access data, invoke tools, or delegate actions to one another. Intel is pleased to collaborate on this open industry effort that builds on established standards and gives enterprises greater confidence as they deploy AI with their most sensitive data," said Anand Pashupathy, Vice President and General Manager, Intel Product Assurance and Security.

OPAQUE first introduced TRACE at the Confidential Computing Summit in June 2026. TRACE reference library passed 135,000 PyPI downloads in its first ten weeks, with technical engagement from major hardware and AI companies, and ongoing standards discussions across the Coalition for Secure AI (CoSAI) and the Linux Foundation ecosystem.

TRACE will be governed through the Linux Foundation, providing a vendor-neutral home for the standard, while CoSAI hosts the technical workstream. Through the workstream, AI companies, cloud providers, silicon vendors, and enterprise users will collaborate to ensure TRACE remains interoperable across AI models, cloud platforms, confidential computing technologies and emerging AI governance frameworks.

TRACE is led by OPAQUE Chief Platform Officer Imran Siddique, creator of the open-source Agent Governance Toolkit, working alongside OPAQUE CEO Aaron Fulkerson and CTO and Co-founder Rishabh Poddar. Founding collaborators include AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), which joins the effort as TRACE's sovereign AI anchor.

TRACE is available today as an open specification with reference implementations and documentation at trace.agentrust-io.com. OPAQUE welcomes technical review and contributions from AI developers, cloud providers, silicon manufacturers and standards organizations interested in advancing portable, independently verifiable runtime evidence for AI.

About OPAQUE

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.

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