NEAR AI Unveils Cloud And Private Chat Solutions To Put Users In Control Of Their AI
In Brief
NEAR AI has launched NEAR AI Cloud and Private Chat, offering hardware-backed, verifiable privacy to enable user-controlled AI across consumer and enterprise applications.
Modular protocol for AI Near stated that it has released the NEAR AI Cloud and Private Chat, describing them as products developed around the principle that users should retain control over their AI systems. The announcement positions these offerings as early steps toward enabling user ownership through mechanisms designed to provide hardware-supported, verifiable privacy.
The company noted that although AI capabilities are advancing rapidly, sensitive and proprietary information still cannot be transferred securely in most AI workflows. Many existing AI APIs require sending data to external infrastructure that users cannot audit, and commonly advertised private modes generally provide no verifiable proof of isolation, limited access, or data deletion. While hosting systems internally can reduce exposure, it often requires substantial resources, specialized expertise, and lengthy deployment periods.
According to the announcement, conventional trust mechanisms such as software controls, internal policies, contractual agreements, and compliance certifications offer only indirect assurances and can be compromised through errors or internal misuse. These limitations are cited as reasons many organizations avoid exposing valuable data to AI systems and as evidence of a broader industry need for privacy solutions that can be verified rather than assumed.
The NEAR AI product suite is presented as an attempt to address this gap. NEAR AI Cloud processes each request within Intel TDX and NVIDIA Confidential Computing environments, where data is handled in an isolated, sealed context that is not accessible to the service provider or hardware operators.
Each inference produces a cryptographic attestation confirming that the model executed on verified hardware with the expected code, and these attestations can be checked independently using public validation services provided by Intel and NVIDIA.
NEAR Private Chat operates on top of NEAR AI Cloud and applies these privacy assurances to routine conversational use cases, including informational, personal, or planning-related queries. It is described as a service intended to offer verifiable privacy so that everyday interactions with AI can occur without exposing user conversations or associated data.
Now Deployed in Production With Brave Nightly, OpenMind, And Phala
NEAR AI Cloud is currently being used by partners such as the Brave Nightly browser, the robotics operating system provider OpenMind, and the confidential cloud platform Phala. These deployments cover a wide range of privacy-sensitive contexts, from consumer interactions to autonomous system operations, all of which require verifiable privacy protections. Together, these platforms reach an audience of more than 100 million users worldwide across consumer and enterprise domains.
Through direct collaboration with engineering and security teams at these organizations, NEAR AI has tested confidential computing under real production demands, including high traffic volumes, predictable latency requirements, and stringent compliance expectations. Input from these partners has influenced the platform’s development, resulting in a system that launches already validated for reliability and capable of supporting sensitive workloads at scale.
NEAR AI Cloud is designed to simplify the transition of existing AI workloads into a verifiably private environment. Its API maintains full compatibility with OpenAI’s interface, allowing current integrations to function without modification. Python and TypeScript SDKs provide built-in support for encryption, key handling, and attestation processes.
Operational performance remains stable, with an estimated latency increase of around 5–10 percent and support for rates of up to 100 requests per second per tenant. Options for dedicated and customized model hosting are available for enterprise scenarios, along with features such as streaming, key-value caching, and model persistence.
The platform aims to make confidential computing accessible as a standard cloud capability, emphasizing ease of adoption, scalability, and production readiness. During the first half of 2026, NEAR AI plans to introduce multimodal models and broaden the platform’s capabilities beyond inference to additional data-centric applications, including early work on private portable memory and continued progress on the DCML roadmap.
The ongoing product direction is centered on enabling verifiable privacy as a default characteristic of all AI workloads, whether for everyday interactions or large-scale enterprise systems.
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About The Author
Alisa, a dedicated journalist at the MPost, specializes in cryptocurrency, zero-knowledge proofs, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, she delivers comprehensive coverage to inform and engage readers in the ever-evolving landscape of digital finance.
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Alisa, a dedicated journalist at the MPost, specializes in cryptocurrency, zero-knowledge proofs, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, she delivers comprehensive coverage to inform and engage readers in the ever-evolving landscape of digital finance.
