The GSMA’s Open Telco AI initiative, launched during MWC26, now has 18 operators signed up, according to Naresh Chouhan of the GSMA’s AI technology and strategy team. He said frontier models have improved massively but still don’t perform well within the telco environment and don’t understand telco language specifically well. Open Telco AI is an open resource for a wider community including academia and large language model (LLM) developers. Its first move was to open up datasets, creating the Telco Capability Index, which measures AI model performance across telecom-specific tasks, with results feeding the Open Telco AI Leaderboard hosted by Hugging Face. Chouhan said telco progress has exceeded expectations: six months after launch, operators such as AT&T, China Telecom and SoftBank have risen swiftly up the leaderboard, and six out of the 10 top-performing models in the benchmarks are telco-originating. AT&T is topping the charts with its OTel 2.0 model, built using more than 400 billion tokens on AMD GPUs, offering network engineering root-cause analysis.