New capabilities enable secure deployment of AI agents on your most sensitive and regulated data with hardware-enforced verifiable rules and cryptographic guarantees built to withstand quantum computing
Redwood City, California and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, May 4, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — OPAQUE, a Confidential AI company headquartered in San Francisco, California, announced today that it has acquired advanced cryptographic AI technology from the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), an applied research pillar of the Abu Dhabi Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC). Already proven in real-world use cases, this acquired technology adds two key capabilities to OPAQUE’s platform. Confidential AI model training and post-quantum cryptographic protection leveraging advanced cryptographic techniques such as multi-party computation and fully homomorphic encryption.
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With this acquisition, OPAQUE, founded by researchers at UC Berkeley’s RISELab, now supports Confidential AI workflows across training and inference, enabling companies to move from isolated AI experimentation to production deployment 4-5x faster.
The acquisition was overseen by His Excellency Faisal Al Bannai, Advisor to UAE President His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Secretary General of ATRC, and Ion Stoica, Co-Founder and Director of OPAQUE, Co-Founder of Databricks, and Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. This is the first time that cryptographic AI technology developed in the UAE has been acquired and deployed at scale by a US-based technology company.
His Excellency Faisal Al Bannai, Advisor to the President of the UAE and Secretary-General of ATRC, said: “This acquisition reflects what the UAE is trying to do: create foundational technologies that the world will adopt.” “The cryptographic AI capabilities developed in Abu Dhabi are now being deployed globally by leading US technology companies. The UAE is not just embracing the AI economy, we are leading it. ATRC will continue to invest in research that will define the next generation of trusted AI.”
“The future of AI depends on unlocking data that was previously inaccessible to organizations,” said Ion Stoica, co-founder of OPAQUE. “Most enterprises store a corpus of data that is too sensitive to use and too valuable to ignore. With this acquisition, OPAQUE becomes the only platform that provides hardware-proven cryptographic evidence across the entire AI lifecycle (training, fine-tuning, inference, and agents) with protections designed to withstand quantum-era threats. This combination exists nowhere else in the market today.”
“AI agents are extremely powerful. They operate at the speed of machines with human-like capabilities, accomplishing in days what entire teams would struggle to complete in a year,” said Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of OPAQUE. “This same power is precisely why it is so difficult to move into production. Agents connected to sensitive systems and regulated data (patient records, clinical research, financial billing) can It can do more damage in days than it can in years. The only way to safely deploy agents is with verifiable rules that are enforced in hardware: provable evidence of what is being done, where it is being done, and which rules are being applied. OPAQUE is built on primitives from all major cloud providers. This allows you to move agents into environments, even on the most sensitive and regulated systems and data.”
Companies store vast amounts of sensitive data, including patient records, financial transactions, confidential information, and proprietary research, that could transform AI capabilities. But using that data across the entire AI lifecycle required point solutions from multiple vendors to be stitched together, each covering a different phase: one for training, one for inference, and one for agent workflow. The result is gaps, complexities, and risks that compliance teams won’t approve of.
OPAQUE eliminates that gap. The acquired technology will extend OPAQUE’s confidential AI platform across training, fine-tuning, inference, and execution of AI agents. We provide verifiable assurance every step of the way, backed by post-quantum cryptography that protects your workloads from current and future threats. For example, ServiceNow runs OPAQUE in production to extend AI capabilities to enterprise customers without exposing data. National health systems can train diagnostic models on patient data across jurisdictions, perform inference across facilities, and deploy AI agents on live clinical data. You can do all this on a single platform. The platform generates hardware-proven evidence that complies with SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, GDPR Article 32, and EU AI law high-risk obligations, proving that data is private, policies are enforced, and regulatory requirements are met.
Importantly, OPAQUE’s architecture means that encryption enforcement is rooted in hardware rather than vendor trust. Customer data (including data processed by sovereign AI programs and regulated companies) remains protected by a trusted execution environment and verifiable certificates that even OPAQUE itself does not have access to. This enables the platform to be deployed on sovereign cloud infrastructures around the world with data-resident cryptographic proofs, allowing national AI programs to deploy sensitive AI without relinquishing on-ground data control or jurisdictional sovereignty.
Across high-stakes industries, the same challenges arise wherever AI systems rely on sensitive data. bank training scam Models across regulatory jurisdictions, defense contractors making tweaks based on sensitive information, and software vendors building AI into products that touch customer data.
The acquisition follows OPAQUE’s $24 million Series B at a $300 million valuation and builds on a customer base that includes ServiceNow, Anthropic, Accenture, and Encore Capital. OPAQUE leverages the acquired technology to support Confidential AI workflows across training, fine-tuning, inference, and agents to move enterprise and sovereign AI programs from isolated experiments to production deployments 4-5x faster with verifiable security and post-quantum protection.
For TII and ATRC, this transaction validates a deliberate strategy. That means investing in fundamental cryptographic research, proving it with world-class large-scale language models, and delivering and scaling it globally through partners with the platform and customer base. The foundational AI technology developed in Abu Dhabi will now be deployed across financial services, healthcare, government, and enterprise SaaS across every continent, establishing the UAE as a producer of cryptographic infrastructure powering the next generation of trusted AI.
“We developed these cryptographic technologies to address a fundamental challenge in AI: how to enable powerful models to process sensitive data without compromising confidentiality or authenticity,” said Dr. Najwa Aaraj, CEO of TII. “OPAQUE was the perfect partner to bring this to market because they have already built the enterprise platform and customer base to deploy it at scale. This is what applied research is about. The fundamental technology developed in Abu Dhabi is now moving from the laboratory to real world deployment.”
About Opaque
OPAQUE is a sensitive AI company. Born out of RISELab at the University of California, Berkeley, OPAQUE solves a core challenge that hinders large-scale AI adoption: concerns about data breaches and non-compliance. OPAQUE provides verifiable privacy and governance for AI, so organizations can securely run models, agents, and workflows on their most sensitive data. The company’s Confidential AI platform provides verifiable runtime governance backed by cryptographic evidence that data, models, and agent actions are private, controlled, and compliant with approved policies throughout any AI workflow. OPAQUE is also the host of the industry’s Confidential Computing Summit. Customers and partners include ServiceNow, Anthropic, Encore Capital, Accenture, and leaders in tech, financial services, insurance, and healthcare. For more information, please visit opaque.co.
About Technology Innovation Institute (TII)
The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) is the specialized applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC). TII is a pioneering global research and development center focused on applied research and new-age technology capabilities. The Institute has nine dedicated research centers in advanced materials, autonomous robotics, cryptography, AI and digital science, directed energy, quantum, secure systems, propulsion and space, and renewable and sustainable energy. For more information, please visit www.tii.ae.
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