OPAQUE Systems, a confidential AI company, announced on 13 October 2026 that its team is joining Anthropic to continue OPAQUE's work. OPAQUE began as a research project at UC Berkeley's RISELab.[1] The company's homepage now says that OPAQUE Systems is winding down its operations.[2]

In the announcement, OPAQUE describes its path from confidential AI to what it calls verifiable AI. Confidential AI means AI workloads run on sensitive data under hardware-enforced protections. Verifiable AI, in OPAQUE's terms, is cryptographic evidence of what ran, where it ran and under which policies. OPAQUE says it worked with a wider community on open approaches to trust and security problems around AI agents and models, through AgenTrust and several open-source projects.[1]

According to the homepage, OPAQUE's open-source work continues at AgenTrust, and projects including Confidential MCP and TRACE remain available under their existing licenses. The Confidential Computing Summit, an industry event OPAQUE created, continues at the Linux Foundation.[2, 3]

Neither OPAQUE page discloses the terms of the arrangement. The New Stack reported on 15 October that Anthropic told The Information it is licensing OPAQUE's technology and hiring some of its engineers. The report added that Anthropic had otherwise released no further information. Citing The Information, The New Stack said those joining include chief executive Aaron Fulkerson and chief technology officer Rishabh Poddar, but not all of OPAQUE's employees. It also reported that neither company had made statements about maintenance commitments for OPAQUE's open-source projects.[3]

The New Stack quoted two outside views. Arjun Jaggi, an applied AI researcher, said a frontier lab's resources could help harden such tools for production. Michael Heinrich, chief executive of 0G Labs, cautioned about a potential conflict of interest when tools that produce verification evidence sit inside a model vendor that is itself being checked.[3]

Sources

  1. From Berkeley Research to the Future of AI: OPAQUE's Next ChapterOPAQUE Systems · 13 Oct 2026
  2. OPAQUE homepage (wind-down notice)OPAQUE Systems · accessed 20 Oct 2026
  3. Anthropic's been eyeing confidential AI. It just made its move with another acquihire.The New Stack · 15 Oct 2026

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