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About The Khronos Group
Every industry needs effective open standards, and Khronos members from around the world cooperate to drive the open standards that are helping to grow markets, reduce engineering costs, and accelerate time-to-market, while still enabling companies to innovate and differentiate. We believe that open interoperability standards should be built by the industry, for the industry, with rigorous specifications and conformance tests to enable consistent cross-platform experiences that help make technology truly pervasive.

The Khronos Group is an open, member-driven consortium that provides a space for the creation of the interoperability standards that enable developers to harness the full power of 3D graphics, XR (VR & AR), parallel computing, machine learning, vision processing and the metaverse. Our portfolio of industry standards includes: 3D Commerce, ANARI, glTF, Kamaros, KTX, NNEF, OpenCL, OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenVG, OpenVX, OpenXR, SPIR, SYCL, Vulkan, WebGL and a number of Safety Critical derivatives, including Vulkan SC, SYCL SC, OpenGL SC and the OpenVX safety critical profile.

180+

Member Organizations

21

Active Standards

58

Countries

4800+

Individual Member Representatives

We are a non-profit organization, and the standards we create are open and royalty-free for the industry to use. We have been developing open standards for over 20 years and continue to grow, with over 180 member organizations contributing to the process, from large corporations to small start-ups, academic institutions and individuals. View the Khronos History Timeline.

Each Khronos standard is driven by a Working Group where member representatives work together to develop a specification and its associated ecosystem. Working Groups are managed by elected Working Group Officers.

Khronos operates under a multi-organization governance model where each member organization gets one vote, in order to avoid single-organization control or dependency. A Board of Directors oversees Khronos’ activities.

Open and Inclusive

The Khronos Group's members are at the core of everything we do, working to develop and maintain every standard we produce through collaboration. To help our members thrive, we are working to ensure they feel as welcome and included as possible, to ensure they have every opportunity to contribute, and to support them to create the best standards they can. Take a look at our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging page to find out what we're doing to make Khronos a safe space for everyone.

Building Ecosystems

Our Working Groups produce far more than just specifications; providing a high quality experience with our standards requires a rich ecosystem of tools and educational materials that will help drive the widespread adoption of the standard. These materials can include sample implementations, conformance tests, Software Development Kits (SDKs), user guides, code samples, and tutorials. A lot of these are produced in public either wholly or in part via open source repositories, such as those on our GitHub page. We also have active outreach programs including news updates, webinars and events, and newsletters, to ensure that all the latest developments and ecosystem updates are shared with the wider community.

Adopting a Khronos Standard

Any developer or organization can access Khronos API Specifications and implement and ship products using the specification completely free of charge, royalty or licensing. However, to ensure that Khronos standards are consistently implemented across multiple platforms, any organization developing a product that implements a standard must pass that standard’s official Conformance Test Suite (CTS) before it can use the trademarked name or logo, or call their product ‘compliant’ or ‘conformant’. Becoming an Adopter is independent of Khronos membership and there is typically a modest fee to support development and quality testing of our standards.

Become a Khronos Member or Adopter

Become a Khronos member to help define, develop, and evolve the open standards that are critical to your business and benefit the wider industry, or become a Khronos Adopter to gain IP and trademark protection for your conformant implementation of a Khronos standard.

Khronos has multiple levels of membership, to enable any organization, large or small, to get involved. See our list of current Khronos Members. All members have access to any Working Group that is driving a standard and any organization is welcome to join.

  • Learn more about Becoming a Member
  • Learn more about Becoming an Adopter
  • General enquiries email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Industry Liaisons

Khronos works with a wide range of industry associations and Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) that may influence our activities. These cooperative Liaisons enable representatives from participating organizations to share feedback on use cases and requirements to help coordinate and cooperate between SDOs and member companies to foster a more integrated standards ecosystem.

Khronos Advisory Forums

Successful industry standards incorporate the requirements and feedback from a wide range of industry experts. Khronos understands that not everyone is able to become a member and so have established a number of Advisory Panels and Forums to enable invited non-member advisors to share their requirements and provide feedback on draft specifications. Advisors are always welcome to join Khronos to enjoy the full member benefits of contributing to our standards.

Proposing New Open Standards

Khronos members and non-members can propose a new collaborative standardization activity by following our New Initiative Process. The Khronos Board will carefully consider

each proposal to ensure that it meets the required criteria so that we invest in proposals where there is strong momentum and a good chance of wide adoption. Successful proposals

will be encouraged to form an Exploratory Group to gather further industry feedback and cooperation before a Working Group is formed and the detailed specification work can start.

The Khronos IP Framework

Khronos operates a robust IP Framework that enables its members and adopters to contribute, develop, and implement royalty-free open standards. The framework balances two important goals:

  • Providing protection for bona fide implementers so that Khronos members and adopters will not assert IP rights or demand royalties.
  • Minimizing licensing obligations to protect members and adopters valuable IP portfolios.

In broad summary, members and adopters agree not to assert their patents against conformant implementations of a standard. The Khronos Group itself does not own or hold any patents.


Khronos standards are globally recognized and deployed in a wide variety of markets and products. Our success is testament to the significant ongoing member contributions that drive the evolution of open interoperability standards that are vital to both our members and the industry.

Neil Trevett, President, The Khronos Group.