Mobile Industry Launches 'Open Telco AI' Alliance
The global mobile industry association GSMA has launched the “Open Telco AI” initiative. Backed by major carriers, the project aims to create common standards and accelerate the development of reliable, secure AI solutions tailored for telecommunications networks.
The initiative was unveiled at Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona, with AT&T and AMD as founding supporters. More than two dozen organizations worldwide have joined the effort, including operators, vendors, and academic institutions. A key motivation for the alliance is the underperformance of general-purpose AI on telecom-specific tasks. According to GSMA Intelligence, only 16% of generative AI deployments in the telecom sector have been applied to network operations due to this performance gap. As part of its contribution, AT&T is releasing a family of open telco AI models. Chip manufacturer AMD is providing the necessary computing power for training and evaluating these models through its GPU platforms and its cloud partner, TensorWave. The alliance will measure the progress of AI models using a "Telco Capability Index," a new benchmark for model performance on telecom-specific tasks. This initiative aims to go beyond generic models to create AI that can interpret complex network data and understand technical standards documentation. Other significant partners include China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, Google Cloud, IBM, Telefónica, and Vodafone. Academic and research contributors providing valuable datasets and materials include Khalifa University, Huawei Technologies France, and Purdue University. This isn't the only cross-industry AI collaboration; the Global Telco AI Alliance (GTAA), which includes Deutsche Telekom, e&, Singtel, SoftBank, and SK Telecom, was launched at MWC Barcelona 2024 to develop large language models tailored for telecommunications. The GTAA officially formed a joint venture in June 2024 to pursue this goal.
