TII sells advanced cryptographic AI technology to OPAQUE
Abu Dhabi proves it can export foundational AI technology at global scale
#UAE #cryptography — San Francisco-based confidential AI company OPAQUE has acquired advanced cryptographic AI technologies from Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research arm of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC). The sale marks the first time cryptographic AI technologies developed in the UAE have been acquired and deployed at scale by a US-based technology company. The acquired capabilities add confidential AI model training, plus post-quantum cryptographic protections to OPAQUE’s existing platform. OPAQUE, founded by researchers from UC Berkeley’s RISELab and valued at $300 million following a $24 million Series B, counts ServiceNow, Anthropic, and Accenture among its customers.
SO WHAT? — Most enterprises sit on vast reserves of sensitive data (patient records, financial transactions, classified intelligence etc.) that they cannot safely use in AI workflows. Stitching together point solutions from multiple vendors to cover training, inference, and agent execution creates gaps and compliance issues. OPAQUE’s acquisition of TII’s cryptographic technologies closes that gap in one platform, offering hardware-enforced, verifiable guarantees at every stage of the AI lifecycle. For the UAE, this deal validates Abu Dhabi’s ambition not just to adopt AI, but to produce and export the foundational infrastructure that powers it globally.
KEY POINTS:
OPAQUE has acquired advanced cryptographic AI technologies from Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the global applied research centre of Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC). The technology sale covers confidential AI model training and post-quantum cryptographic protections. The deal is the first acquisition of UAE-developed cryptographic AI technology by a US-based company, and was overseen by UAE Presidential Adviser and ATRC Secretary General His Excellency Faisal Al Bannai.
The acquired technologies add two critical capabilities to OPAQUE’s platform.
The first is confidential AI model training powered by advanced techniques including multi-party computation and fully homomorphic encryption.
Secondly, the technologies add post-quantum cryptographic protection, designed to secure AI workloads against both current and future threats.
OPAQUE now covers the full AI lifecycle on a single platform, from training and fine-tuning, to inference and AI agent execution, with verifiable cryptographic guarantees at every stage. Previously, enterprises were forced to stitch together multiple point solutions, creating compliance gaps and security risk.
The platform is hardware-enforced, not trust-based. Customer data is protected by Trusted Execution Environments and verifiable attestation that even OPAQUE itself cannot access, making it deployable on sovereign cloud infrastructure worldwide with cryptographic proof of data residency.
OPAQUE now generates extensive hardware-attested evidence aligned with SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, GDPR Article 32, and EU AI Act high-risk obligations, covering the regulatory requirements most likely to block enterprise AI deployment in heavily regulated sectors.
Real-world deployment is already underway. ServiceNow runs OPAQUE in production to extend AI capabilities to enterprise customers without exposing their data. The platform is built for high-stakes environments including healthcare systems training diagnostic models across jurisdictions, banks running fraud models across regulatory borders, and defence contractors fine-tuning on classified intelligence.
The acquisition accelerates OPAQUE’s enterprise deployment speed significantly. With the added TII technologies, OPAQUE moves enterprises and sovereign AI programmes from isolated AI experiments to full production deployment four to five times faster than before.
The deal was announced at Make it in the Emirates, reinforcing the UAE’s positioning as a producer and exporter of advanced technology, not simply an adopter of capabilities developed elsewhere.
For the ATRC, the transaction provides proof of strategy. The council invested in foundational cryptography research at TII, proved it on world-class large language models, then commercialised through partners with the platform and customer base to scale it. As a result, TII’s advanced cryptographic technology is now active in a globally deployed product, operating across financial services, healthcare, government, and enterprise SaaS on every continent.
ZOOM OUT — TII’s Cryptography Research Centre runs one of the most active cryptography research programmes outside of Europe and North America. The centre brings together theoretical and applied cryptographers working across post-quantum cryptography, confidential computing, cryptanalysis, and sovereign cryptographic library development. The effort includes active R&D partnerships spanning Yale University, Ruhr University Bochum, NYU, and several other leading institutions across Europe and Latin America. The centre's global standing is reflected in its contributions to the US National Institute of Standards and Technology's post-quantum cryptography standardisation process: one of the most consequential cryptographic standardisation efforts underway anywhere in the world.
[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]
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