6G roadmap and AI‑native Open RAN validation
Industry posts and talks outlined a 6G innovation roadmap and argued that Open RAN validation will increasingly require AI‑native approaches focused on trust verification. IEEE ComSoc shared FCC Ronald Repasi on 6G goals, AI‑RAN Alliance chair Alex Choi described a six‑engine safety kernel for AI validation, and Free6GTraining highlighted 3GPP TR 38.914 on emerging 6G radio shapes and scenarios. ( )
The mobile network after 5G is starting to take shape in public, and the emerging message is that 6G planning now includes both radio design and new ways to test artificial intelligence inside the network. (3gpp.org; ai-ran.org) A radio access network is the part of a mobile system that links phones and devices to cell sites, and Open Radio Access Network is an effort to split that system into interoperable parts from different vendors. Industry groups now say that once artificial intelligence starts making live network decisions, validation has to check not only performance but also whether those decisions stay inside trusted bounds. (3gpp.org; arxiv.org) The standards track behind that work is 3rd Generation Partnership Project Technical Report 38.914, a Release 20 study on “6G Scenarios and requirements” approved in December 2024. 3rd Generation Partnership Project said on March 23, 2026, that the report was 90% complete after its Fukuoka meetings and will guide later radio work and input to the International Telecommunication Union’s IMT-2030 performance process. (3gpp.org; 3gpp.org) That report does not read like a clean break from 5G. 3rd Generation Partnership Project says it covers deployment scenarios, resilience, self-organization, service awareness, sharing, and migration from 5G to 6G, while recent industry analysis says terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks are both in scope. (3gpp.org; free6gtraining.com) Ronald T. Repasi, a commissioner at the United States Federal Communications Commission, added a policy layer in a talk posted by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Communications Society in March 2026. The video is titled “Creating An Environment For 6G Innovation, Development and Growth,” and places regulation and market structure alongside engineering in the 6G timeline. (youtube.com) On the artificial intelligence side, the AI-RAN Alliance has been building a separate validation push around AI-native networks, meaning networks designed from the start to run artificial intelligence in and around the radio system. The alliance says it is establishing testing and validation frameworks and endorsed labs for those technologies. (ai-ran.org; viavisolutions.com) Alex Jinsung Choi, the AI-RAN Alliance chair and a SoftBank principal fellow, has been one of the main public advocates for that approach. The alliance named him chair in 2024, and alliance materials say its work centers on experimentation, benchmarks, shared infrastructure, and real-world validation rather than formal standards writing. (mobileworldlive.com; fierce-network.com) Researchers are also spelling out why ordinary testing may not be enough once artificial intelligence agents control slices, scheduling, or optimization loops in Open Radio Access Network systems. A 2025 paper on AI verification in Open Radio Access Network said explainability alone does not guarantee reliable operation and proposed near-real-time consistency checks for live systems. (arxiv.org; ieee.org) The practical result is that two tracks are now moving in parallel. 3rd Generation Partnership Project is narrowing the radio requirements for 6G, while the AI-RAN Alliance and related researchers are trying to define how operators will prove that artificial intelligence-driven Open Radio Access Network behavior is safe, predictable, and trustworthy before 6G arrives. (3gpp.org; ai-ran.org; arxiv.org)
