How NANDA is building open infrastructure for trusted AI-agent discovery, and interoperability
Louis Powell, Director of AI Technologies, GSMA
The mobile industry has demonstrated what open standards can achieve at global scale. Through decades of collaboration on interoperability, roaming and network identity, mobile operators have enabled billions of people to communicate across networks and national boundaries. At GSMA, we are extending this tradition through initiatives such as GSMA Open Gateway and CAMARA, which make network capabilities accessible to developers through standardised APIs, and Open Telco AI, which brings operators, technology companies, developers and academia together to build accurate, efficient and trusted telco-grade AI.
Open Telco AI is already showing the value of open industry collaboration. Working with GSMA and its collaborators, AT&T post-trained the OTel family of open telco models on specialised telecom data, successfully delivering +30 models across different sizes and architectures. Designed to balance accuracy and efficiency, and trained to abstain when reliable information is unavailable, the OTel models provide a practical foundation for safer, more capable AI in telecom environments.
AI agents represent the next important evolution of this connected ecosystem. As agents begin acting on behalf of individuals, businesses and organisations, they will need to discover, authenticate, communicate and transact with one another across networks, platforms and countries. This creates new opportunities for mobile operators in agent identity, trusted interactions and secure access to network capabilities; but it also creates a clear responsibility to protect consumers through robust authentication, authorisation, privacy and safeguards against fraud or misuse.
NANDA Index, offers a promising approach to this challenge. Originally proposed by Professor Ramesh Raskar at the MIT Media Lab, NANDA is exploring open infrastructure for an internet of AI agents. Rather than requiring everyone to adopt a single agent registry, NANDA Index connects independently operated discovery systems through a common resolution layer, an approach that is particularly relevant to telecom operators, which already manage federated infrastructure across different markets, regulatory environments and service providers.
For GSMA, the opportunity is to connect the strengths of the mobile ecosystem with the emerging agentic web. Network-based identity verification, standardised APIs and secure connectivity can complement NANDA Index’s discovery capabilities, helping agents establish trusted interactions while preserving local governance and operator independence.
Our commitment is that trust and security are built in from the outset: agents should be able to prove who they are, what they are authorised to do and on whose behalf they are acting, while consumers remain protected through clear permissions, privacy safeguards, traceability and effective mechanisms to prevent abuse.
We welcome the work of Professor Ramesh Raskar and the wider NANDA community in developing open approaches to agent discovery, identity and interoperability. Please contact me if you would like to discuss NANDA and other AI initiatives at GSMA.