OPAQUE Acquires Advanced AI Cryptography Technology from Abu Dhabi's TII, Expanding Confidential AI Across the Lifecycle with Post-Quantum Protection

This new capability enables the secure use of AI agents on the most sensitive and regulated data, with rules that can be verified and assured by hardware and cryptographic guarantees designed to withstand quantum computing.

Redwood City, Calif. & Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates–(ANTARA/Business Wire)– OPAQUE is a Confidential AI company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Today, OPAQUE announced that it has acquired advanced AI cryptography technology from the Technology Innovation Institute (TII). TII is a pillar of applied research in Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC). The acquired technology has been proven in various real-world use cases and adds two key capabilities to the OPAQUE platform: Confidential AI model training supported by advanced cryptographic techniques such as multi-party computation, fully homomorphic encryption, and post-quantum cryptographic protection.

OPAQUE was founded by researchers from UC Berkeley’s RISELab. Following this acquisition, OPAQUE supports Confidential AI workflows across training and inference, shifting companies from siloed AI experiments to production deployments that are 4-5 times faster.

This acquisition was overseen by His Highness Faisal Al Bannai, Secretary General of ATRC and Advisor to His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE; and Ion Stoica, one of OPAQUE’s Founders and Board Members, Founder of Databricks, and Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. For the first time, AI cryptography technology developed in the UAE has been acquired and deployed at scale by a US technology company.

“This acquisition reflects the UAE’s goal of producing foundational technology used worldwide,” said His Highness Faisal Al Bannai, Advisor to the President of the UAE and Secretary General of ATRC. “The AI cryptography capabilities developed in Abu Dhabi have been deployed globally by a leading US technology company. The UAE is leveraging the AI economy and leading it. ATRC will continue to invest in research that defines the next generation of trusted AI.”

“The future of AI depends on access to data that has previously been untouchable by various companies,” said Ion Stoica, one of OPAQUE’s Founders. “Almost every company has datasets that are too sensitive to use and too valuable to ignore. With this acquisition, OPAQUE becomes the only platform providing hardware-tested cryptographic proofs across the entire AI lifecycle - training, fine-tuning, inference, and agents - with protections designed to withstand quantum-era threats. A combination that doesn’t exist in any market today.”

“AI agents are incredibly powerful: capable of operating at machine speed with human-like capabilities, solving in days problems that would take an entire team a year,” said Aaron Fulkerson, Chief Executive Officer of OPAQUE. “Yet it is this power that makes AI Agents so difficult to deploy in production environments. AI Agents connected to sensitive systems or regulated data - for example, patient medical records, clinical research, financial claims - can cause damage in days that criminal teams couldn’t achieve in a year. The only way to deploy them safely is with verifiable and hardware-assured rules: verified proof of what is run, where it is run, and which rules are enforced. By leveraging core features from every leading cloud computing provider, OPAQUE enables the deployment of AI agents in production environments - even on the most sensitive and most regulated systems and data.”

Many companies store vast amounts of sensitive data - for example, patient medical records, financial transactions, confidential information, proprietary research - that could transform their AI capabilities. However, using this data across the AI lifecycle requires combining separate solutions from various vendors, each covering different phases: one for training, one for inference, and one for agent workflows. This creates gaps, complexity, and risks rejected by compliance teams.

OPAQUE eliminates all these gaps. The acquired technology expands OPAQUE’s Confidential AI platform across training, fine-tuning, inference, and AI agent execution. This technology also provides verifiable guarantees at every stage, backed by post-quantum cryptography that protects workloads from current and future threats. For example, ServiceNow runs OPAQUE in production to expand AI capabilities for enterprise customers without exposing their data. National healthcare systems can train diagnostic models on patient data across jurisdictions, run inference across facilities, and deploy AI agents on live clinical data in a single platform. This platform generates hardware-verified proofs; complies with SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, GDPR Article 32; and high-risk obligations under the EU AI Act, proving that data remains confidential, policies are enforced, and regulatory requirements are met.

Most importantly, OPAQUE’s architecture enables cryptographic security enforcement dependent on hardware, not vendor trust. Customer data - including data processed by sovereign AI programmes and regulated companies - remains protected by Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and verified attestation, even OPAQUE cannot access that data. Therefore, the platform can be deployed on sovereign cloud computing infrastructure worldwide with cryptographic proof of lo