TL;DR | What’s in This Issue?
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From the Executive Director: Focus on Digital Sovereignty and Agentic AI after GTC Berlin, launch of the new weekly CC news round-up, and the establishment of the CCC Japan Chapter (inaugural meetup: Dec 10, 2026, Tokyo).
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New Members: Welcoming Alpha Compute (Premier Member), KubeTEE, and Supera System.
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Outreach: +47% in AI-assistant referrals, upcoming presences at OSS Japan, KubeCon NA, and CC Summit 2027, alongside OCP attestation alignment.
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TAC Updates: Agentic AI white paper finalized, new Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) SIG proposed, annual dstack project review, 2027 budget planning, and upcoming TAC Chair elections with Dan Middleton stepping down.
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Industry News: Google Cloud Confidential G4 with Blackwell GPUs, NVIDIA Confidential Bare Metal, Cohere Model Vault beta, Fortanix CoCo support, Intel TDX roadmap, Microsoft Clean Rooms preview, and Anthropic absorbing OPAQUE Systems.
From the Executive Director
Hello Community Members,
Confidential Computing is in the news, and it’s for the reasons we’ve been talking about for the past few months at the Confidential Computing Consortium: Digital Sovereignty (whether at the national, corporate or individual level) and Agentic AI. The biggest set of news stories came from the multiple members of the Consortium who were at GTC NVIDIA Berlin, including Alpha Compute, who have just joined us as a Premier Member (welcome!). Digital Sovereignty and Agentic AI are two of the CCC’s strategic pillars and they overlap in a variety of ways, not least in the regulatory sphere, which, as it happens, is another of the pillars. You can expect to see articles and white papers from us over the next few months: please keep an eye out.
Given how Confidential Computing is becoming more newsworthy, we’ve decided to add a new resource to the CCC website: a weekly new round-up of the key stories that involve, impact or are relevant to our community and ecosystem. If we miss anything, I’m always keen to hear about it, so please let me know.
The last topic I want to note in this newsletter is the creation of a CCC Japan Chapter. With increasing interest in CC in Japan and a number of new members, we’re pleased to announce this new initiative. It’s open to everyone with an interest in Japan, and particularly those who are based there or who have local offices. You’ll find the community here and we hope to have our first meet-up on 2026-12-10 in Tokyo, just after Open Source Summit Japan. Please get in touch if you’re planning to attend either of these events, do get in touch.
From the Outreach Committee Chair
Growing Our Reach and Sharing Expertise
The Outreach Committee continues to advance global engagement, industry collaboration, and awareness of confidential computing through new initiatives and upcoming events. We welcome new members Alpha Compute (premium member), KubeTEE, and Supera System to the growing CCC community.
- Upcoming Events: CCC shared several industry events opportunities, including Open Source Summit Japan, KubeCon North America, and the Confidential Computing Summit in San Francisco on April 19, 2027. These events provide opportunities to connect with the community and advance confidential computing adoption.
- Content and Community Engagement: The committee reviewed September outreach performance, highlighting a 47% increase in referrals from AI assistants. Upcoming content includes a white paper exploring the intersection of Agentic AI and Confidential Computing, alongside member spotlights, technical articles, and event recaps. Members are encouraged to share and amplify these resources across their networks.
- Industry Collaboration and Attestation Standards: Following discussions at the OCP Summit, the committee explored opportunities to strengthen collaboration between CCC and the Open Compute Project (OCP) on attestation standards. Further discussions will focus on aligning terminology, identifying potential differences in approaches, and promoting interoperability across the ecosystem.
Get Involved: CCC members are encouraged to participate in upcoming events, contribute technical content, share community updates, and help amplify CCC initiatives to advance confidential computing adoption globally.
From the TAC Chair
The TAC finalized its Agentic AI white paper, which will be published shortly. The paper argues that confidential computing gives AI agents more than isolated execution. Agents get a verifiable identity tied to attested execution, and they can generate and protect their own keys inside the trust boundary, which keeps their knowledge isolated from the cloud provider and the control plane. Raghu Yeluri (Intel) wrote the initial draft and served as editor. Thanks to everyone in the community who reviewed and commented on the paper, including Rene Kolga (Google), Mike Bursell (CCC ED), Manu Fontaine (Hushmesh), Ofir Azoulay-Rozanes (Anjuna), and Rahib Amin, whose feedback was especially substantial. A follow-on reference architecture paper is planned.
Rachel Wan (Google) proposed a Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) SIG to guide industry readiness for confidential computing. A charter proposal will go out on the mailing list and will position one to three near-term deliverables. If you are interested, please join the discussion.
Hang Yin (Phala) delivered the annual review of the dstack project. GitHub activity roughly doubled this year, and the project added support for AMD SEV-SNP, GCP, AWS Nitro, and Blackwell GPUs. Interrupt batching delivered up to 2.8x speedups on I/O-heavy workloads, and a stable 0.6 release is the next milestone. Dstack is both our newest and most popular project! If you haven’t given it a look yet check out: https://github.com/dstackai/dstack
Ahead of 2027 budget planning, Michelle Roth (LF PMO) reviewed how CCC supports its projects. She also described how ambassador and mentorship programs could be scoped and funded, and noted that either needs a community member willing to lead it. Mona Vij (Intel) requested funding to bring Gramine-TDX to production maturity, and Thore Sommer (Veraison) outlined needs in infrastructure, project management, and mentorship. Funding asks are collected in GitHub issue #393, and the Governing Board is reviewing the TAC’s request. TAC chair elections are approaching, and Dan Middleton (NVIDIA) will not run again. He is looking forward to ramping up the next technical leader in our community.
Recent News
- 🆕 Explore the latest developments across our ecosystem by visiting the CCC weekly news round-up section on our website.
- Google Cloud announced general availability of Confidential G4 instances with NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, bringing hardware-backed confidential computing to NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs. The offering enables organizations to protect sensitive AI models, prompts, and data during execution while scaling confidential AI workloads.
- NVIDIA announced the expansion of Confidential Computing across global AI infrastructure, introducing Confidential Bare Metal to help frontier AI model developers deploy workloads on third-party infrastructure while retaining control of proprietary models and data. NVIDIA also outlined expanded confidential computing support across Grace Blackwell, Rubin, and NVIDIA DSX OS. A Tech Talk on Confidential Bare Metal is planned for the November TAC meeting.
- Alpha Compute joined the Confidential Computing Consortium as a Premier member, securing voting seats on the Governing Board and Technical Advisory Council. CEO Brittany Kaiser will represent the company on the Governing Board, supporting industry collaboration on confidential AI, data ownership, and open standards.
- OPAQUE Systems announced its team is joining Anthropic, bringing expertise in confidential AI and verifiable computing to Anthropic’s AI initiatives. OPAQUE is winding down operations, while its open-source projects, including Weight Custody Manifest, Confidential MCP, and Confidential A2A, will remain available through AgenTrust.
- Fortanix announced Confidential AI support for CNCF Confidential Containers (CoCo), enabling enterprises to deploy AI models, agents, and applications on Kubernetes using hardware-backed trusted execution environments across confidential CPUs and GPUs, with attestation and key management protecting sensitive workloads.
- Cohere launched a public beta of Confidential Computing on Model Vault, powered by NVIDIA H100 GPUs on Microsoft Azure. The offering combines end-to-end encryption and remote attestation to protect enterprise prompts, documents, model execution, and responses while enabling customers to verify the computing environment before releasing sensitive data.
- Intel outlined its confidential computing roadmap focused on Intel TDX, announcing that the upcoming Diamond Rapids Xeon platform will be the last to support Intel SGX. Intel will prioritize TDX, including trusted I/O, enhanced attestation, and post-quantum cryptography, while continuing SGX support and security updates into the early 2030s.
- Microsoft announced new digital sovereignty capabilities, including Azure Confidential Clean Rooms in limited preview. The capability uses confidential computing to support privacy-preserving multiparty data collaboration while limiting exposure of sensitive information.
- Cisco published a reference design for securing AI workloads using Confidential Containers, combining Intel TDX, NVIDIA H100-NVL GPUs, and Fortanix attestation and key management on Cisco UCS infrastructure. The architecture enables encrypted container workloads with hardware-backed verification and policy-controlled key release.
- Google Cloud released an updated Confidential Space image, adding support for executing workload containers as non-root users with configurable launch policies. The October update also removes compromised CA certificates from the operating system trust store, strengthening security controls for confidential workloads.
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