OPAQUE has acquired advanced cryptographic AI technologies from the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) to add two critical capabilities to OPAQUE’s platform: confidential AI model training powered by advanced cryptographic techniques such as multi-party computation and fully homomorphic encryption, as well as post-quantum cryptographic protections.
Founded in 2019 by researchers from UC Berkeley’s RISELab, and now with this acquisition, OPAQUE supports Confidential AI workflows across training and inference, moving enterprises from isolated AI experiments to production deployment 4-5x faster.
“AI agents are extraordinarily powerful: they operate at machine speed with human-like capabilities, delivering in days what entire teams would struggle to complete in a year,” said Aaron Fulkerson, Chief Executive Officer of OPAQUE. “That same power is exactly why they are so difficult to move into production. An agent connected to sensitive systems or regulated data — patient records, clinical research, financial claims — can do damage in days that a team of malicious actors couldn’t match in a year. The only way to safely deploy them is with hardware-enforced, verifiable rules: provable evidence of what ran, where it ran, and which rules were enforced. Building on primitives from every major cloud provider, OPAQUE makes it possible to move agents into production — even on the most sensitive and most regulated systems and data.”
Enterprises sit on vast amounts of sensitive data — patient records, financial transactions, classified intelligence, proprietary research — that could transform their AI capabilities. But using that data across the full AI lifecycle has required stitching together point solutions from multiple vendors, each covering a different phase: one for training, another for inference, another for agent workflows. The result is gaps, complexity, and risk that compliance teams won’t sign off on.
OPAQUE eliminates those gaps. The acquired technology extends OPAQUE’s confidential AI platform across training, fine-tuning, inference, and AI agent execution. It delivers verifiable guarantees at every stage, backed by post-quantum cryptography that protects workloads against current and future threats. For example, ServiceNow runs OPAQUE in production to extend AI capabilities to its enterprise customers without exposing their data. A national healthcare system can train diagnostic models on patient data across jurisdictions, run inference across facilities, and deploy AI agents on live clinical data — all on a single platform. The platform generates hardware-attested evidence aligned with SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, GDPR Article 32, and EU AI Act high-risk obligations, proving data remained private, policies were enforced, and regulatory requirements were met.
Critically, OPAQUE’s architecture means cryptographic enforcement is rooted in hardware, not in vendor trust. Customer data — including data processed by sovereign AI programs and regulated enterprises — remains protected by Trusted Execution Environments and verifiable attestation that even OPAQUE itself cannot access. This makes the platform deployable on sovereign cloud infrastructure worldwide with cryptographic proof of data residency, enabling national AI programs to adopt confidential AI without surrendering on-soil data control or jurisdictional sovereignty.
Across high-stakes industries, the same challenges arise wherever AI systems rely on sensitive data: banks training fraud models across regulatory jurisdictions, defense contractors fine-tuning on classified intelligence, software vendors embedding AI into products that touch customer data.
“We developed these cryptographic technologies to address a fundamental challenge in AI: how to enable powerful models to work with highly sensitive data without compromising confidentiality or trust,” said Dr. Najwa Aaraj, Chief Executive Officer of TII. “OPAQUE was the right partner to bring this to market because it has already built the enterprise platform and customer base to deploy it at scale. This is what applied research is for — foundational technology developed in Abu Dhabi, now moving from the lab into real-world global deployment.”
