GSMA and ITU Sign Letter of Intent on Trusted Open AI for Telecoms as OTel Model Downloads Pass 30 Million
Signed at MWC26 Doha on 12 November, the non-binding agreement covers telco-grade AI for network operations, telecom-specific datasets and the open OTel model family; OTel 2.0 has passed 30 million downloads as of October.
The GSMA and the International Telecommunication Union have signed a letter of intent to collaborate on trusted, open AI for telecommunications, announced at MWC26 Doha on 12 November. The non-binding agreement defines three workstreams: telco-grade AI for network operations and standards, telecom-specific datasets, and the training, deployment and evaluation of the open OTel model family.
The flagship OTel 2.0 model, a Gemma 4 31B-IT post-trained on 400 billion telecom tokens, leads the Open Telco AI leaderboard and has passed 30 million downloads as of October, up from 16 million in May. Context figures from operators underline the specialization case: AT&T states general-purpose models answer standard telecom questions correctly only 60 to 70 percent of the time, against about 90 percent for telecom-trained models.
The movement changes the economics for operators in developing markets. Open-weight telecom models remove license costs from the equation, leaving integration, local fine-tuning and application development as the value-adding work, which is where most national operators, including those building sovereign AI capabilities in Southeast Asia, would engage. The LoI carries no timeline or funding, and download counts do not measure deployed use.