OPAQUE, in Partnership with Other Industry Leaders, Introduce TRACE, an Open Standard to Advance Runtime Verification for AI

OPAQUE, the Confidential AI company, is launching 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, according to OPAQUE.

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. 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, the company said.

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, 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," 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."

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

Founding collaborators include AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), which joins the effort as TRACE's sovereign AI anchor.

"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."

TRACE is available now as an open specification with reference implementations and documentation at trace.agentrust-io.com.

For more information about this news, visit www.opaque.co.