TII contributes post-quantum cryptography to OPAQUE 3.0 AI standard

OPAQUE launched OPAQUE 3.0 at the Confidential Computing Summit in San Francisco, introducing capabilities designed to help organizations produce verifiable, cryptographic proof of how their AI systems operate.

The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council, said it is a founding partner of the open standard behind the release and contributed the post-quantum cryptography used to secure it.

The announcement comes as AI agents are increasingly used to perform autonomous tasks across organizational infrastructure and act on sensitive information, including patient records, financial data, and classified intelligence. Organizations and governments need to demonstrate how AI systems behave and whether governing rules are enforced.

OPAQUE 3.0 is designed to govern each AI system action through rules enforced in hardware, while generating a tamper-resistant, independently verifiable record that auditors, regulators, and customers can confirm.

The standard is connected to sovereignty because it allows nations and organizations to verify how AI is governed without relying only on assurances from external providers.

OPAQUE 3.0 secures AI across the lifecycle, from model training and deployment to autonomous agents entering production. The system combines lifecycle protection with post-quantum cryptography, which is designed to remain resilient against future quantum computers that could compromise present-day encryption.

“The future of AI depends on unlocking the data organizations have never been able to touch,” Ion Stoica, Co-Founder of OPAQUE, said. Stoica said OPAQUE is the only platform delivering hardware-attested cryptographic evidence across training, fine-tuning, inference, and agents, with protections designed to withstand quantum-era threats.

As a founding partner, TII said it anchors the standard in sovereign-AI deployments and integrates its Abu Dhabi-developed post-quantum cryptography into OPAQUE 3.0. The institute said long-term cryptographic resilience is important because data intercepted today could be decrypted by future quantum systems.

This contribution aligns with the UAE’s National Encryption Policy, which mandates a national transition to post-quantum cryptography and identifies AI systems among the infrastructure to be assessed for readiness.

“Sovereignty in the age of AI is defined by the ability to verify, not trust,” Dr. Najwa Aaraj, CEO of TII, said. Aaraj said open and transparent standards allow organizations and nations to independently validate how AI systems are governed, while post-quantum cryptography helps preserve confidence against future security challenges.

The launch follows an earlier development this year, when cryptographic AI technology developed at the institute was acquired by OPAQUE and deployed at global scale. According to TII, this was the first instance of UAE-developed technology of its kind being adopted in this manner by a major U.S. technology company.