Abstract The future of smart cities has been significantly impacted by Internet of Things (IoT) and distributed intelligence, where a large scale of data are collected from massive amounts of heterogeneous devices and distributed intelligence brings storage, computing, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) functionality close to the end devices where data are generated for providing novel services and applications. However, AI empowered systems face many challenges due to the inscrutability of complex AI models which weakens the trust of users. This paper provides a general understanding of the underlying concepts and challenges in trustworthy distributed intelligence. A use case of district heating network is illustrated to explore the proposed concepts, technologies, and challenges for enabling trustworthy distributed intelligence for smart cities.