AgenTrust Fellowship 2026: applications open 1 to 29 August

[imran-siddique]

Applications for the AgenTrust Fellowship 2026 open on 1 August and close on 29 August. Three to five fellows, six months, part-time at 20 hours a week, paid.

Read the announcement

Who funds it, and who you would be working for

Stating this plainly because it matters here. OPAQUE funds the fellowship and is the employer. The work is in these open repositories, under their existing licences and governance, and the point of the programme is to put more hands on the open specifications rather than on a product. If that distinction is important to you, it should be, and it is the reason it is spelled out rather than left as an inference.

Who it is for

Security engineers, distributed systems researchers, AI governance and compliance professionals, and Ph.D. students interested in trustworthy AI standards. You do not need all of those. The stack spans hardware attestation, policy engines, transparency logs, and standards drafting, and very few people arrive strong in more than one of those.

What you would actually do

Contribute code and specifications across the AgenTrust projects, and complete a public technical artifact: a paper, a conference talk, or something comparable that is yours and carries your name.

Selection is based on a technical proposal, so the most useful preparation is to look at the work rather than the programme description. These are open right now and labelled fellowship:

• All fellowship issues across the org (ten open at the time of writing)
• trace-spec: verification depth, key revocation, action-receipt conformance
• cmcp and ca2a
• agent-manifest

These are real open items, not exercises invented for candidates. A proposal that engages with one of them concretely, or that argues something in the specs is wrong, will read better than a general statement of interest.

Some honest context about the state of the work

If you are deciding whether this is interesting, the gaps are more informative than the achievements:

• Peer attestation in cA2A has run on live SEV-SNP hardware, but one-directionally: the caller appraised the callee, not the reverse. Mutual simultaneous attestation is open work.
• The TRACE registry's anchor format is specified but not yet published, so third-party inclusion verification is documented rather than exercisable. That is an open issue.
• Azure TDX cannot be attested offline at all, because the guest gets a vTPM-MAC'd report rather than a signed DCAP quote. Anything wanting offline verification has to design around that.
• There is no behavioural anomaly detection or agent quarantine tooling. TRACE gives the audit foundation; detection is not built.

Mentored by Imran Siddique (@imran-siddique), Chief Platform Officer at OPAQUE and creator of the Agent Governance Toolkit.

Applications go through the OPAQUE Greenhouse board, linked from the announcement. Cohort starts September 2026. Questions about the technical work are welcome in this thread, and asking one before you apply is a reasonable use of it.

[qubeena07]

This is a really cool initiative @imran-siddique. I'm planning to apply for the fellowship and want to work on cmcp and AGT. Been reading through the attestation flow in cmcp, curious about the mutual attestation gap mentioned for cA2A, is there any early design thinking on bidirectional verification at the gateway boundary, or would that be starting fresh? Also wondering how the Azure TDX case factors in since it can't produce a signed DCAP quote offline. Looking forward to digging into this more.

[zoheb341]

@imran-siddique As someone working closely with AI-enabled platforms, I find the focus on verifiable AI agents, attestation, and trust infrastructure especially interesting. Building open, interoperable standards for agent governance feels like an important step toward making AI systems more trustworthy, auditable, and enterprise-ready. Looking forward to following the outcomes from this fellowship.