6G Native AI and Channel Foundation Models

Abstract

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and wireless communications is widely regarded as a core objective of sixth-generation (6G) systems. However, both the meaning of native AI and the type of AI capability that should be embedded into future wireless systems remain open to interpretation. This paper discusses 6G native AI from a system-design perspective and argues that native AI should be co-designed, optimized, and deployed as an intrinsic component of the wireless system rather than as a removable post-deployment add-on. From this perspective, conventional task-specific supervised models are difficult to use as the main technical basis of native AI because they depend heavily on labeled data, generalize poorly across propagation conditions, and require fragmented designs for different channel-related tasks. Motivated by these limitations, we position channel foundation models (CFMs) as a channel-centric foundation-model paradigm for 6G native AI. We define the scope of CFMs, clarify their differences from task-specific wireless AI models and large language models, and summarize three pretraining families: generative, discriminative, and hybrid pretraining. We further discuss how CFMs may support physical-layer processing, radio access network intelligence, and integrated sensing and communications. Preliminary CSI-CLIP-based results are included as bounded evidence that CFM-style pretraining can improve positioning and beam prediction when task-specific labels are limited.