Appia Foundation provides a connecting layer for AI trust, translating global foundational standards into assessable criteria
Summary
- The Linux Foundation announced the formation of the Appia Foundation under the Joint Development Foundation (JDF) to establish modular open source specifications and standardized conformity assessment frameworks across the global AI value chain.
- The Appia Foundation delivers an open connecting layer providing testing criteria, evaluation guidelines, and component typologies to verify and audit safe, trusted AI models, systems, and applications.
- The Foundation is supported by a broad, cross-industry coalition of members, including Arm, Armilla AI, Ericsson, Google, Mastercard, Microsoft, Mitsubishi Electric, Naaia, Nemko, Omron, OpenAI, Schneider Electric and Siemens, establishing a vendor-neutral, collaborative environment to scale trusted AI deployment.
, /PRNewswire/ — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the formation of the Appia Foundation. Hosted under the Joint Development Foundation (JDF), the Appia Foundation will establish modular specifications that provide a connecting layer to bridge foundational global standards with practical, trusted assessments across the global AI value chain.
Regulations around the world are moving to active enforcement, and value chain partners require evidence of trustworthy AI in contracts and vendor evaluations. International frameworks like ISO/IEC standards establish vital foundations, and they unlock a powerful opportunity for a consistent, shared mechanism to translate these global rules into practical, verifiable proof.
To address this, the Appia Foundation delivers an open connecting layer by building on international standards and established frameworks to develop publicly available global specifications. The Appia specifications are organized across a Requirements and Guidance layer and an Assessment Enablement layer. These specifications provide the testing criteria, evaluation guidelines, and component typologies needed to effectively assess AI models, systems, applications, and processes.
“As international standards and legal frameworks become more established, global organizations need a consistent, practical way to verify that AI systems conform to new expectations,” said Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation. “The Appia Foundation establishes a neutrally governed environment where the entire industry can collaborate on a common assessment framework. By building this infrastructure in the open, we are helping organizations reduce complexity, lower operational costs and build trust.”
The Appia specification architecture is designed for functional modularity and evidence pass-through. Instead of assessing an entire system from scratch, organizations evaluate only what is relevant to their role, component and regulatory context. When an upstream provider demonstrates conformity with relevant modules, that technical evidence passes through to downstream users. This enables seamless reuse of conformity evidence across the value chain, reducing friction while maintaining clear boundaries of accountability.
“AI systems now make decisions about people’s loans, their children’s schools and their jobs. People on the receiving end deserve to know those systems were built and assessed against criteria that hold up to scrutiny,” said Craig Shank, Executive Director of the Appia Foundation. “The Appia Foundation was formed to do that work: creating publicly available specifications that organizations across the AI value chain use to demonstrate their systems meet those criteria. By establishing this open framework, we are building the accountability layer required to scale safe and trusted AI across major industries.”
Initial members of the Appia Foundation include Arm, Armilla AI, Ericsson, Google, Mastercard, Microsoft, Mitsubishi Electric, Naaia, Nemko, Omron, OpenAI, Schneider Electric and Siemens. Read our white paper to learn more. To contribute, become a member, and help shape the future of AI conformity, visit https://appiafoundation.org.
Supporting Quotes
“As AI becomes increasingly embedded in systems from cloud to edge, organizations need consistent ways to demonstrate conformity with emerging standards and regulations. At Arm, we see the Appia Foundation as an important step toward creating a practical approach to building trust across the AI supply chain. It has the potential to reduce fragmentation and strengthen confidence in AI deployment across the ecosystem.”
– Mark Hambleton, Senior Vice President of Software, Arm
“The more AI systems can be assessed against credible, shared criteria, the more insurable they become. Neutral, open governance is what makes that evidence something the whole market – including its insurers – can rely on. That’s why we’re joining the Appia Foundation: it gives the market a common basis for proof, one that lets underwriters price AI risk and stand behind it.”
– Karthik Ramakrishnan, CEO, Armilla AI
“At Ericsson, we believe harmonized standards and regulations are essential to scaling trustworthy AI globally. The Appia Foundation helps establish conformity specifications that give industry a practical and consistent way to demonstrate conformity across the AI value chain for mobile infrastructure.”
– Per Beming, Chief Standardization Officer, Ericsson
“We’re joining the Appia Foundation to work together with the industry to help develop global AI safety standards. Building on our history with groups like ISO and NIST, we believe collaboration is the best way to build secure AI that people can trust.”
– Amanda Storey, Vice President of Trust and Safety, EMEA, Google
“AI governance is reaching an inflection point with the introduction of GenAI at scale, where principles and standards must translate into measurable, real-world outcomes for the AI systems. The Appia Foundation helps close that gap by enabling organizations to consistently demonstrate how their AI systems meet evolving expectations across the value chain. For Mastercard, this is a critical step in strengthening trust, accelerating adoption, and enabling AI to deliver safely at scale.”
– Andrew Reiskind, Chief Data Officer, Mastercard
“As AI adoption accelerates, organizations need practical ways to demonstrate that their systems are trustworthy. The Appia Foundation can help by translating emerging standards and governance expectations into more consistent, assessable evidence across organizations and jurisdictions. That kind of shared, practical foundation is important to building trust and helping AI scale more responsibly.”
– Natasha Crampton, Chief Responsible AI Officer, Microsoft
“In alignment with Mitsubishi Electric’s AI Ethics Policy, we are firmly committed to delivering responsible AI systems across the products and services we offer to our customers. In this context, we recognize that the establishment of globally accepted standards for assessing the trustworthiness of AI systems constitutes a critically important objective. We therefore view this as a valuable opportunity to contribute to the Appia Foundation’s initiatives aimed at advancing international collaboration toward that objective.”
– Yu Okada, Deputy Director of AI Transformation Innovation Center, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
“Trustworthy AI can’t stay a promise: it has to become an architecture. This initiative builds the common foundation to turn regulations and standards into verifiable assessments across the AI value chain. Building trustworthy AI is one of the defining challenges of our era and it calls for a shared, global answer: one modular framework of trust that holds across every jurisdiction, every standard, every actor in the AI value chain. At Naaia, that’s the whole point: making compliance operational, and trust scalable.”
– Nathalie Beslay, CEO and Founder, Naaia
“Establishing a clear, industry-aligned architecture for AI standards is exactly what the ecosystem needs right now. Too many organizations struggle not with ambition, but with fragmentation across frameworks, controls, and interpretations. A Linux Foundation initiative that brings structure, openness, and technical rigor to AI standards can provide a common foundation for implementation and assurance. At Nemko Digital, we see this as a critical step toward making trustworthy AI scalable, auditable, and deployable.”
– Dr. Pepijn van der Laan, Global Technical Director, Nemko Digital
“Building global trust in advanced AI will require more than shared principles, it will require shared, practical standards. The Appia Foundation can help translate emerging frontier AI practices into open specifications and technical standards that provide a common foundation for the global ecosystem. Drawing on the Linux Foundation’s tradition of developing in the open, this work can advance with greater speed, transparency, and accountability, strengthening safety across the AI supply chain and giving governments, businesses, and the public greater confidence in how advanced AI is developed and deployed.” – Ann O’Leary, Vice President of Global Affairs, OpenAI
“At Schneider Electric, we believe that transformative technologies reach their full potential only when governed openly and collaboratively. Joining the Appia Foundation is a natural extension of that conviction. By anchoring the AI value chain within a neutral, community-driven structure under the Linux Foundation, we can ensure it evolves in a way that is transparent, interoperable, and accessible to organizations across every industry.”
– Philippe Rambach, Chief AI Officer, Schneider Electric
“As an initial member of the Appia Foundation, Siemens is committed to building trusted AI across industries. We bridge the real and digital worlds – from factory floors and railways to further critical infrastructure – and understand that trust must be verifiable at every layer. Appia’s open, modular framework provides exactly that: a practical way to utilize existing global standards and complement own specifications for professional AI applications in our industries.”
– Markus Reigl, Director Technical Regulations and Standards, Siemens
About the Joint Development Foundation
The Joint Development Foundation (JDF), part of the Linux Foundation family of projects, accelerates organizations developing technical specifications, standards, data sets, and source code. JDF provides the corporate and legal infrastructure, experienced support staff, and extensive network necessary to achieve the highest levels of industry and international standardization. For more information, please visit us at jointdevelopment.org.
About the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards and data. Linux Foundation projects, including Linux, Kubernetes, Model Context Protocol (MCP), OpenChain, OpenSearch, OpenSSF, OpenStack, PyTorch, Ray, RISC-V, SPDX and Zephyr, provide the foundation for global infrastructure. The Linux Foundation is focused on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.
The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of the Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
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