The Technology Innovation Institute will help define the specification and serve as its reference environment for sovereign AI deployment, as TRACE is contributed to the Linux Foundation for vendor-neutral governance.
Developed with founding collaborators AMD, Intel, OPAQUE and TII, and supported by Microsoft, TRACE brings a common standard for portable, verifiable runtime evidence to a fragmented ecosystem.
Abu Dhabi, UAE, 26 August 2026 - The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), today announced its participation as a founding collaborator in TRACE (Trust, Runtime Attestation, and Compliance Evidence), an open standard that produces portable, hardware-attested evidence of what ran, under which policies, and which data classifications were involved. Developed with founding collaborators AMD, Intel, OPAQUE, and TII, and supported by Microsoft, the specification was contributed to the Linux Foundation, which provides vendor-neutral governance, with the technical workstream hosted by the Coalition for Secure AI (CoSAI).
The standard, originated by OPAQUE, addresses a problem that has grown as organizations move from isolated model deployments to agentic systems operating across sensitive data and tools. Running a model on infrastructure that an organization controls establishes where computation happens. It does not establish what ran once the system entered production, whether the approved model and policies remained in force, or how an agent interacted with the data it was given. That distinction is central to sovereign AI. National-scale deployment requires more than domestic infrastructure and domestic models; it requires evidence that can be verified independently without trusting the operator of the system.
TII contributes to TRACE across three areas of institutional expertise: cryptography-based confidential computing, post-quantum cryptography, and identity and authentication. TII is engaged in the drafting of the specification, protocol design, and the integration of sovereign components aligned to the standard.
Dr. Najwa Aaraj, Chief Executive Officer, TII, said: “Evidence that cannot be independently verified is not evidence, and evidence that expires when cryptography moves on is not durable. TII is contributing the foundations that address both: confidential computing rooted in cryptography, post-quantum protection so that attestation records remain trustworthy over their full retention period, and the identity and authentication layer that supports verification of which agent acted and the authority context under which it operated.”
TII will also serve as a reference deployment environment for TRACE, exercising the standard against operational sovereign AI requirements and returning those findings to the specification. The intent is to establish that role beyond TRACE, across technologies where sovereignty and privacy are the governing constraints.
Jim Zemlin, CEO, Linux Foundation, said: “The widespread adoption of autonomous systems requires independent, cross-platform proof of operational integrity. TRACE provides the open-source community with a unified, hardware-attested specification for compliance and security evidence. By hosting TRACE under neutral governance, we are ensuring trust in AI remains open, portable and verifiable across any infrastructure.”
Aaron Fulkerson, CEO, OPAQUE, said: “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. 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 viable before the market hardens around incompatible vendor trust systems.”
TRACE is available today as an open specification with reference implementations and documentation at trace.agentrust-io.com. Its authors welcome technical review from developers, cloud providers, silicon manufacturers and standards organizations.
