The Appia Foundation is a project hosted by the Linux Foundation that develops specifications for assessing AI systems against standards. OpenAI announced on June 23, 2026 that it had helped found the foundation, which it said "will develop open, modular specifications intended to translate international standards and established frameworks into practical assessment criteria across the AI value chain" (Source: openai.com). The foundation's website is appiafoundation.org.
Stated purpose
OpenAI's announcement describes Appia's work as helping to develop "a critical missing trust layer by which third parties check conformity with standards, producing clearer and more reusable evidence when models, infrastructure, and applications are developed by different organizations," and as creating "a shared technical language that will allow national and international institutions to trust each other's work." It presents the foundation as the next step after its federal governance blueprint (Democratic Governance of Frontier AI: A blueprint for a federal framework (OpenAI, June 2026)), its published guidance on what third-party evaluations should disclose, its testing partnerships with CAISI and the UK AI Security Institute, its Preparedness Framework and its Frontier Governance Framework, stating that "Appia's work is aimed at the next challenge: making those practices interoperable across organizations, jurisdictions, and the supply chain" (Source: openai.com).
OpenAI's September 21, 2026 position paper on international standards names Appia among the bodies an international standards effort should work with, describing it as an "implementation focused" organization "developing practical specifications that connect international standards with real-world AI assessments" (Building Standards for the Next Phase of AI (OpenAI, September 2026)).
The foundation's membership beyond OpenAI, its governance and any published specifications are not established in the sources reviewed; the description above is OpenAI's.
Relationships
- related: OpenAI — co-founder.
- related: International AI Standards, Third-Party AI Assessment
- related: Building Standards for the Next Phase of AI (OpenAI, September 2026)
- related: Frontier Model Forum, Open Secure AI Alliance — other bodies named alongside it in OpenAI's September 2026 paper.