TII Joins TRACE as Founding Collaborator to Advance Sovereign AI Trust
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).
TRACE is an open standard that generates 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 addresses a growing problem as organizations shift from isolated model deployments to agentic systems operating across sensitive data and tools. While running a model on controlled infrastructure establishes where computation happens, it doesn’t confirm what actually ran in production, the adherence to approved models and policies, or interactions with data. This distinction is crucial for sovereign AI, which requires independent verification of execution and data handling.
TII contributes to TRACE in three key areas:
- Cryptography-based confidential computing: TII is involved in drafting the specification and protocol design.
- Post-quantum cryptography: Ensuring the long-term trustworthiness of attestation records.
- Identity and authentication: Supporting the verification of agents and their operational contexts.
Dr. Najwa Aaraj, Chief Executive Officer of TII, emphasized:
“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, testing the standard against operational sovereign AI requirements and sharing findings with the broader community. This work aims to establish TII as a leader in developing and implementing standards for secure, sovereign AI technologies beyond TRACE.
Jim Zemlin, CEO of Linux Foundation, stated:
“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 to achieve this goal.”
